Post-Crankenstien
by Butch Deadlift
Summary: Hitting rock bottom. Apparently you can only go up, except usually you just plateau. The life and times of a post-addiction Gunnar Jensen, the giant who knows all too well that the future has switched from being a promise to being a threat. [Set post Expendables 2] [Rated M for adult themes, violence, language]
1. Chapter 1

When you wake up in the morning and you peel your tongue from the roof of your mouth, take a drink.

Barney yanked his protesting body from the bed where he laid, the sour and sweat stained shirt stuck to a body that resembled the frame of tweety bird- a puffed up chest and under-worked stick-like legs. Do you know if you work out your upper body too much, you end up looking disproportionate? Barney doesn't know, and it's already happened to him. You can see how his joints are all stiff in the morning, how he looks in the mirror and doesn't recognize the face staring back at him. You can see it plain as day. Watch this- now he's going to sit down on that hard wooden chair in the dark and hold his head in his hands. If he didn't sleep with it, swim with it and run with it, everyone would assume his hair was a hairpiece. Age hasn't been good to Barney Ross, but in the end, is it good to any of us?

When you step back from the window and stop spying on your boss, take a drink. You've been pathetic enough this morning, already pissing away whatever intellect you have left.

Still, you're back like a dog returning to its vomit and you're looking through the blinds again. Maybe it's because you want to catch him during a time when he's almost as fucked up and vulnerable as you are. Sure, it's in different ways, but it's the same thing anyways.

Fuck.

He saw you through the shades, you think, anyways. It was a trick of the light. Go back to bed, pretend it didn't happen, slide under the filthy covers of your bunk in this shitty Russian hotel with your bottle of cheap scotch and make sure not to spill any on the bed, goddamnit!

You wait and wait, but the gentle rap on the door doesn't come. You're waiting so long you fall asleep and maybe that's for the better.

"Gunnar! Get up mate we're out at 0400 hours!" says the twat named after the holiday. You groan and roll over, pathetic. They all know you're not using again, you don't have that slimy look to you and your hair isn't as greasy, that doesn't stop you from being a slob though. Get the fuck up, haul your ass out of bed, no one wants to open the door and see you laying here under the thick comforter with your hair all a mess. Really, it'd be embarrassing.

You assured yourself you were going to get up in a minute but now Hale is kicking in your door. Somewhere deep inside you realize that these men must genuinely like you, that you must mean something to them. Other mercenary teams, they would have left you here and been happy about one less way to split a paycheck. Maybe other teams would have killed you dead when you were about to throw one of their own on a bunch of spikes. You're contemplating this in your own foggy sort of way when a large black fist closes around your ankle and drags you out of bed. All 6' 5" of you, to be exact, and an 11 inch bottle of the cheapest scotch around. It's made of recycled plastic, you checked.

When there's a job in twenty minutes and you're laying on the floor half naked and hung over, take a drink.

In slow motion you get dressed under the supervision of Caesar, yanking your body into motion and feeling just as stiff and derelict as Barney looks.

If you look up pathetic in a dictionary, you'll see a picture of Gunnar Jensen putting on a Kevlar vest under the gaze of an irritated black man. You want to be pissed off and take it out on Hale, but you also know that he's just doing his best to make sure you're able to board the archaic plane and fight. It's a simple hostage extraction mission, not that you care very much.

When you're walking out of a hotel to get in some shitty plane, take a drin- oh wait, you left you're cheap scotch in the hotel room. Is your flask still full? No, the one under your hat. YES, the one on your hip. You don't have it? Well tough luck buddy, you're old enough to be taking care of your own shit.

Next think you know you're boarding the plane that's older than dirt and you can feel the cold stares of some of the guys who are supposed to have your back. You're guessing that not everyone was as up to the idea of waking you up as Hale was.

"You gonna tie me up again?" you ask to Christmas and only receive a cold stare in return. Okay not funny, you get it. The half smirk on your face falls into a sigh as you sit down. Being the liability isn't fun and it's not easy either.

Barney doesn't even look at you when he does the briefing in his drawling voice. You absently wonder what the fuck is wrong with his face but let it go. There's no reason to think about it, not while you're supposed to be trying to pay attention.

Still, it looks frozen by injections and facelifts. It's no secret to the team that Barney and Tool spend at least some of their cash on trying to look youthful. Botox only lasts six months or so, then the swollen face droops down. Vertical scars across the hairline? Sure sign of a minor facelift. Botox causes cancer. Tango long enough with the plastic surgery and you'll end up with a face full of fuck and a scrotum fill of tumors. How long until Barney sees that yanking skin over his aging bone structure isn't going to make him look younger? Maybe he already knows.

"Krokadil is a drug that's got 10 times the kick of heroin at a third of the price." Barney starts. It sounds so rehearsed. Don't scoff, you're already skating on thin ice. He's trying not to look at you because he knows heroin will always pique your interest, no matter how many times you kick it.

He dyes his hair. What a sad sack of shit. You can tell, you've looked into what you've dubbed the pseudo-hairpiece enough to see that the scalp usually isn't botched black in some places. Your own gray blonde hair, unwashed and probably teeming with gently respiring bacteria, isn't dyed. You feel a firm sense of pride, especially when you look into Barney's right eyebrow, the one that looks permanently surprised, or when you watch Barney run like a marionette.

"These guys dunno how to make it right without robbing from pharmacies and using the red part of match books. That's where our guy comes in, chemist Doctor Hans Damme of Germany. He was kidnapped by the cartel 5 days ago and negotiations have not gone well. The junkies are demanding far too much money, and we charge less than they want. That's why we're here." Barney finishes wanting to sound short and concise, implying some sort of master plan and methodical thinking style.

You want to talk about the chemical makeup of the heroin offshoot, how it rots your skin and creates a sore as soon as you miss a vein, how it creates a gangrene that ends in amputation or death. You want to describe what it's like for the addicts to simply not be able to get out of bed in the morning, their blood poisoned by the drug they made from iodine, red phosphorus and codeine. You're bursting with this information; you can feel it coming out of every pore. You also remember as time and time again you've been looked down upon for bringing up who you were before you joined all this. You want to clear your throat and tell everyone, but there's no one who will care.

You know they're all jealous. If you had to stop doing this, stop killing for pay, you could. With your degree you might be able to land some shit pharmacy job and work until you drop dead; these guys? If Barney ever stops working, if he ever wakes up one morning and can't run anymore, if arthritis creeps into his hands and he can't shoot his dumb little pop pop pistols, he's done. How long could he ride out on his savings? Five years?

Smirk, Gunnar, you've earned it. 


	2. Chapter 2

You want to be ass deep in some junkie den, shooting up zombies and rescuing a scientist who might respect your degrees. Instead everyone's all huddled around outside the hangar waiting for the contact to show up with a van. Everyone's in their own personal coma. Barney decided to take the time and do something that would help the mission greatly, elaborating on what exactly we're up against and showing the layout of the property. Just kidding, actually he's taking you aside and is going to chide you or do whatever he's gonna do. Accepted back into the group or not, after that thing with Yin, everyone but the little gook and Hale is on your tail. The only reason you're here is because you're a loose cannon and they'd rather have you pointed at the enemy instead of fucking up their own plans.

The actual name for the liver spots which are probably cropping up on his back and hands, that's hyperpigmented lentigines. When a dermatologist or a plastic surgeon talks Barney through the latest procedure, they probably use the word rhytide instead of wrinkle. The creases in his skin that he irons out with facelifts and botox, that's dynamic wrinkling, hyperfuctional facial lines, years of movement of the face muscles fuck up the skin underneath. Static rhytides, those are called by the flaming ball in the sky and years of gravity pulling his face down. Any of this ring a bell? Does it matter?

The only time you've ever made a difference in this team is when you've been working against it. Maybe making a difference is better than nothing. Barney's standing in his shapeless flannel shirt so you can feel his hot breath on your chin. It's cold enough so that you can see it if you look down, billowing out of his mouth. Can you feel this?

"You good, Gunnar?" he asks, as if you're not. The hangar is suddenly a hospital room and Barney is the annoying secretary. The only thing that's missing is the paperwork.

"Fine." you practically grunt. You're not the most emotionally mature man at the age of 55, you still act like you've got a chip on your shoulder when you do. You see it as not being emotionally dead enough to bury your feelings; the team sees it as a liability.

Either way, they can go fuck themselves. After that shitstain Billy died, you're the only sniper they've got. You only use the term shitstain because that's what you saw on the back of his pants after he kicked the bucket. He was writhing on the ground, doing some ugly dance in the Ukraine wind, "I'm dying" he said while he was dying. What a fucking numbskull.

It takes a fire of at least 1600 degrees lasting 7 hours to consume a human body. You wonder why you all didn't at least attempt to burn the kid.

Then again, when you thought you were dying, you fucking asked Barney. There's still a circular wound on your chest where he shot you with his pop pop pistol. Difference is though, you're still here, and shitstain was probably dug up from under them rocks and torn apart by huge Russian bears with their heart shaped heads. You smile at that, the thought of the bears coming out of the woodwork as soon as you left. You've also been spacing out, by the way, Barney's looking at you with that concerned look, like he thinks you're not all there or you're gonna see red and try to snuff a member of the team again. Or it might be gas.

"I didn't want to take this job, not with you here. I'm trusting that nothing's gonna go bad with you here." he says earnestly, again, though, that could be gas. He's 5' 9", eight inches shorter than you are. You're positive you could beat the shit out of him and the 11 years he has on you wouldn't work. His exposed forearms are criss-crossed with these huge fucking veins, because he works out so much. Well, not entirely because he works out so much, more or less because he's so fucking old and he insists on working out. His muscles need more oxygen and his regular veins and arteries just weren't doing the job, so the roadwork crew of his body decided to turn side streets into super highways so the lactic acid wouldn't build up due to the replacement of an aerobic process with an anaerobic one. The effect is gruesome and makes you slightly uncomfortable.  
(The old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, it works both ways)  
If you stuck a pin into those veins, would the side of the plane look like a Kill Bill set? Pressurized blood spewing out onto your face? Needles into veins, it's something that you'll always been enthused by. It took months for the mosquito bites to fade from your inner thigh, were you shot up. Shooting up into your arms is fucking stupid and you didn't  
(don't)  
do it. It's like broadcasting to the world that you're a junkie and proud every time you want to roll up your sleeves. Plus, it makes you think of that movie with Jared Leto, the one where his arm gets cut off. Ass to ass, ass to ass! It would have been good wanking material if the crazy mother wasn't getting electrocuted and Leto getting his arm prepped to be sawed off at the same time. You're thinking about editing it, but then you realize you haven't edited a video since 3/4 film was still the best you could use.

Gunnar, stop looking at his fucking veins and say something.  
(He would do the same to us!)  
You look into his droopy eyes and say "Aye Aye, Captain" with a fake salute, one where the middle finger isn't even touching your eyebrow. The forefinger is slapped across it and the effect is comical, you think. Barney grimaces at the pirate jokes, the breed that you've been pushing on everyone. Your own voice is still ringing in your ears "It's good to hang pirates!" Why did they want you to let the last one go when they've killed all the other ones? What difference does it make that one more scum of the earth is dead? Why the FUCK did Yin think that hitting you with a steel toed boot was warranted? You had to get stitches for it, there's a small scar on your left eyebrow, the opposite of Barney's over surprised one.

Barney had said everyone hated stitches, but you think that he likes them more than he might say. Check out that scar running parallel to his hairline. He cuffs you on the shoulder as if you're the tiny guy wearing uppers on his boots.

We all get old. It's just a matter of time.

When you rejoin the other four men, the contact still hasn't shown his mug. You're tempted to sit down, but the old proverb or whatever the fuck is right. A body in motion stays in motion, and sitting down will only make you stiff and uncomfortable when you get back up.

"Call the client?" Yin suggests in broken English, still at your side. Hale has dropped down and started doing push-ups, evidently the tension and excitement too much for him to take without expending it on something. Christmas whispers something to Barney, like he always does. If you didn't know better, you'd say they were butt buddies; as far as you know everyone's getting the same pay, but Christmas is definitely the second in command.

Barney's on his older than dirt cellphone, a Motorola razor. It's been smashed on several occasions and still Barney buys a new one. It satisfies him to hear it slap shut between his fingers when he's done calling someone, but that doesn't stop it from breaking in his pocket every other mission. You don't have a cellphone, because in the words of Hewie Louis, it's Hip to be Square. Barney's coming towards the group with his hands crammed in his pockets.

"Change into regular clothes, we're doing some surveillance then going in." he says, cracking his knuckles. You noticed years ago that when he makes a fist, his knuckles are completely flat. You assume they were punched from mountains to flat desert plane somewhere along the line. It makes his hands look anything but intimidating.

You're yanking on worn clothes and a jacket and everyone else is too. This is baby back bullshit. You're the first one done and Yin and Hale follow you out.

"You already worked up a sweat, huh?" you ask the black giant, raising an eyebrow. It doesn't even look like you have eyebrows, it never has with your blonde hair. It used to be something that bugged you a little bit. Hale nods and smiles, sort of. He's wearing that baseball cap turned backwards, without the goggles that are usually plastered there. Next thing you know everyone's walking with their guns up a fucking trail. No one's told you anything, you and Road are just carrying up the back of whatever fucked formation this is supposed to be. It's November and the wind here is cutting through your jeans.

You want to ask what s going on, but Barney and Christmas already look all testy. It's a 7 mile walk to the small village where this junk house is and apparently there's going to be some surveillance followed by infiltration to locate the guy, then the extraction.

Barney pretends to be some grizzled  
(how can you be grizzled if you keep dying your hair?)  
merc who only cares about a paycheck, but you know he's going to end up putting a stop to the entire operation rather than just getting the target out of there. Maybe it's his short man syndrome; he needs to be a hero or something. Of course, Yin is suffering from the same thing and he doesn't feel the need to be Mr. White Knight all the fucking time. Then again, Yin is about as important to the group as the duct taped seats of the plane. If you'd been fighting Toll road you probably wouldn't have held him over those spikes.

You refuse to think that you wouldn't have won if it was Toll Road as opposed to Yin Yang. You won't even entertain the idea. Sometimes it s easiest to deal with things if you're lying to yourself. Hell, Barney does it all the time and he's supposed to be the leader, right? He's like the pimple on your ass that hurts before your fingers even find it while itching.

After less than a mile of walking with guns out, everyone's squabbling over those stupid Bourne movies, yourself included.

"The fourth one was bad because there was no character development, no protagonist." protests Hale, his big gun slung over his shoulder absently.

"The shaking camera was not as bad." says the Asian midget in his broken English. While everyone else is trying to decode what the hell he just said, reply, agreeing with Hale.

"The new guy wasn't as deep as Bourne."

"As if you know about depth." Christmas mutters in spite of himself. Until now he'd been pretending to be alert. It's obvious no masked men are going to come tumbling out of the sparse brush around the trail, no matter how interesting that might make things.

You can't think of any witty one liner to shoot out, so instead you just look at the snow as if it's interesting. Toll seems amused by this and you don't care. For years you've been viewed as the reject, degrees or not. Before Toll there was some high and tight marine with a record of misdemeanors and public drunkenness. He got blown away 2 years before Toll showed up, but before that, it was Marty who played the role of the team fool. Someone had to step into the shoes. If you make people think you're weak, you can come back strong in the end. Or, something.

You like to pretend like it's not an accident that you act like an idiot. Just like you liked to pretend that you could control your heroin addiction, just like you liked to pretend selling out the team for 100 thousand dollars was something you were actually capable of. The team either views you as a sociopath or a-

Just like that you smell the village, before even seeing it over the ridge. The junk house is facing the cliff; you and the rest of them are on a cliff leading to it.

When the smell of iodine fumes makes your eyes water, take a drink. If you can't do that, at least pull your scarf up over your nose.

The house is a decaying old duplex that looks like something you'd see in Tennessee. There's that undertone of wafting urine that reminds you of the bathroom at the Old Point Bar, except what it really reminds you of is your grandfather. More often than not, in his later years, there would be daubs of urine on his pants. Now, that image has turned into something you fear more than death itself, that budding incontinence that is sure you grab hold of you, more specifically the muscles of your bladder, and turn you into a laughing stock. You feel sweat coming down your face, the smell that makes your pupils dilate. Suddenly you notice you have to pee. After gruffly saying it and turning away as the rest of the guys probably exchange looks of question, you plunge your hand down your pants. Dry, it's alright, you piss and shake extra hard. Everyone has that fear that comes from seeing another person. When you're related to someone, that fear pumps through your blood, is in every bit of genetic material.

You picture little daubs of pee in every 12th chromosome of your DNA. You're no biologist, but you know enough. The guys probably think it's because of memories you have of doing heroin. That's definitely for the better.

Smell is the sense that works best when the world decides it wants to hurl you into shitty memories.

"You good, Gunnar?" Barney asks for the second time today, as if you're someone who needs to be handled with kid gloves. You see red for an instant and then nod. This isn't the time to fuck everything up. Minutes later, everyone s on their goddamn bellies looking at the house, seeing what goes on. When you move back from the barrel of your rifle to relieve the pressure on your neck, you'll see your own reflection, distorted by the lens and darkened by the tinted glass. When you look in the mirror, your eyes shut off, it's a sight they've seen so much that there's no reason to reprocess the situation.

Big Barney Ross keeps looking at you out of the corner of his eye. Maybe his face would be thoughtful, or chiding, or something, but considering the fact that it doesn't move much, it's more or less a flat expression.

Botox, it s the perfect poker face. It's the perfect way to see something new in the mirror.


	3. Chapter 3

You're practically starting to doze with the scope of your gun jammed into your eye. You can feel the ring around it forming, like the time when you stuck a peanut butter jar to your face for three hours. Why had you done that again? Maybe it was a dare, maybe it was for attention. There's no suction, so you won't have the angry red busted blood vessels, but the ring will be there. Hours of watching men in tracksuits with beepers run the stuff around in their shitty cars isn't doing much for you. It's a simple operation, you're guessing that the target is held in the basement of the house, definitely not in the sheds outside by the looks of it.

Barney is saying something, but unfortunately his slightly slurred voice doesn't carry well. By the time it gets down to you, Toll Road is saying it. It's like a putrid game of telephone, Toll's decidedly bad and rather hot breath blowing into the side of your face.

"Your breath smells like shit." you mutter back, after he's told you about how they'll be going back to the plane and making a plan to infiltrate at nightfall.

"At least I don't have dirt behind my ears. Mommy forgot to tell you to wash?" he shoots back in a harsh whisper. You wipe off the spit that's now on your chin.

"My ears don't look like a prolapsed seal cunt." you say. That ends it and Toll's face is very red. Oh well, he shouldn't have left himself open like that. For the rest of the walk back he's quiet, thank god. Nothing that comes out of his mouth is meaningful unless it has something to do with blowing shit up anyways.

You check behind your ear for dirt with your bare finger. After, you lick the side of your hand and rub vigorously. Maybe it's time for a shower.

The Excedrin you're chewing is making your mouth numb, the white slop burning the inside of your mouth. If Jack Torrance did it, why can't you? It would go nice with a drink, some of that corrosive scotch that's in your room. Tanning, botox, heroin, drinking, none of it is a problem if you're not planning on living much longer.

You have endless ways of committing suicide without DYING dying. If you're in the woods with a bunch of assholes and no liquor, don't take a drink. Rattle out the Excedrin, chew it until your mouth is dry with it. It's in the creases of your lips. Can you feel that?

Your mother saved your baby teeth in a book. Glued them right to the page.

He's just jealous. None of these men can handle the fact that you're not only smart and strong, but you're also handsome, talented and blonde haired with blue eyes. There's nothing better than it and for the life of you, you can't figure out why that Maggie girl was throwing herself at Barney so much during the last mission. She was doing all but making kissy faces at him, and he didn't even reciprocate any of it, not even with a hug. He's too busy with Christmas, you think, but why that would get in the way of some hot ass is beyond you.

The walk back is relatively quiet, Caesar is playing with his guns, Yang is complaining about pay for his imaginary family, Christmas and Barney are talking tactics and Toll Road is pouting about the ear remark. He's a little bit sensitive about it, and that's the understatement of the fucking year. One day you'd like to see him break down and cry about it or something, that'd be hilarious. You're contemplating picking up a rock and throwing it at Yang's head, just to get his attention and start a friendly scuffle or something, but the way everyone's been such a dick to you makes you not want to do it. Instead, you opt for a joke.

"Guys, so, a pirate walks into a bar a-"

"We've heard it." says Caesar, weaving a soft cloth into and out of his big fucking gun.

You're a little embarrassed, because it's pretty fucking funny, that joke is. You grin a little, itching the inside of your arm.

"I don't think Toll did."

Mistake. He's stopped in his footprints. You laugh a little, trying to get it going. It doesn't work, you clear your throat. Now you're yanking on the collar of your jacket.

When he continues walking, so do you. You could take him. You're half expecting Barney to fall back from Christmas and come chide you, tell you to lay off the ex-wrestler with his cauliflower ears. Except that never happens, he doesn't even bother eying you. It's for the better, looking into his face is like looking into a recycling bin.

When he dies, they're going to have to cut that thing up to make sure animals don't choke on it or something.

If it somehow gets into the sea, some dolphin could wear Barney's face as a hat. On it's muzzle. For 20 years.

The idea almost has you into hysterics and your hands are planted on your knees, your barking laugh ringing out into the nature, scaring birds. This time Barney does turn back and give you what might be a glare. Again, you can't tell, his face is pretty static. It might also be gas, or it could be him trying to crack his neck by turning it around. Is he raising an- nope, that's just his permanently surprised eyebrow. Fuck, you could really go for a drink right now.

More mindless drone walking and you're all back at the hangar leaning against the plane or sitting on old fuel tanks or whatever the fuck.

"From what I see," here we fucking go, speech by Barney Ross, we have to listen to this halfwit talk about whatever. You're itching your stubble and trying to hold in a fart. "there's about 100 men coming in and out. Seems strange for a house that doesn't look like it's more than 600 square feet or so, so there's probably a large basement we're not seeing. That would explain the absence of buildings around it and the levelness of the land that surrounds the property. I'll bet that the target is underground somewhere. I doubt we'll have much trouble, no one I saw today looked armed. Don't think that these are a bunch of skinny addicts," he makes note to turn away from you, not wanting to make eye contact.

Some air escapes from your nose and you smile a bit, nothing else.

"because from what I know about the drug, it makes your skin rot off."

You open your mouth to say something about Road's ear but you're cut off before a sound escapes your mouth.

"Nor do they wear gold chains and track suits." pipes in Christmas, who has been looking at Barney adorably until now. You remember giving him your blade during the beginning of the Pirate mission in Albania, you also remember it being back in your things not long after. What an asshole. You make a mental note to act retarded to him for the rest of the day.

Act. Right.

You lick your teeth. They feel smooth and alien in your mouth, they have for a long time now. Can you feel this?

Barney clears his throat and goes on, lighting up a cigar.

"I'm sure that they're under the 'Don't get high off your own supply' type of thing, so don't expect to be shooting down a bunch of scaly junkies, is what I'm saying." Shit, that sounded fun to you. You can't help but be the least bit disappointed. Gunnar, you should throw some input in there, you seem a little spaced out. You're still itching your face and under the blonde stubble a little splotch of irritated skin is showing. It doesn't suit your face well, stop.

"When are we going in?" you ask stupidly.

"Sundown." answers Caesar, still cleaning his gun.

"Clean that thing anymore and the paint'll come off." says Christmas with a grin. Caesar only shrugs, it gets a halfhearted laugh out of the team though. It's around 3 hours until sundown and the walk itself took everyone 'bout 2 hours and 20 some odd minutes. That means roughly an hour and a half of hanging out at this hangar. By the time you all get there, it should be

"Hanging out at a hangar, huh boys?" you say conversationally. Barney smiles (gas?)  
and shakes his head and you flop on the hard concrete and try to get some shut eye.

"Gunnar!" screams Barney. Your snoring always annoyed him the most, that's for damn sure. To avoid getting kicked you roll over and get up. The sun has just about started to set, by the time you get to the faded yellow duplex, it's darker than sin.

Barney's leading the group. His knees are bent and he's doing that half run. You're all at points surrounding the complex. He does one of those hand signals that look very important and militant, but are more or less up for interpretation because they aren't in use anywhere else. Still, everyone goes forward, boots hitting the hard earth. Was there a dog around here? Christ, stepping in shit would really suck right now.

Takatakatakatakatakataka goes your automatic gun. Strong men with mesh stretched across their muscles fall down, sometimes close enough so that when they stumble stupidly to the floor, spit flies from their mouth and hits your chin. You swing the butt of your gun across a man's face and watch as his teeth and probably his jaw breaks. Where everyone else is doesn't matter, where the target is doesn't matter. You're always ranting and complaining about just getting the target and getting out, but here you are dispatching man after man. You're hit with a little bullet in the leg and you can feel the wound pumping out blood along with the cut. The pain is intensifying, you feel alive. You want to hoot and holler and you do, destroying any element of surprise. The hired muscle come at you with blunt weapons and guns, but they're hopelessly unskilled, all they are is exactly that- muscle.

You're bent down and ripping the necklaces off their necks. You'll hawk them at a pawn shop when you get back, the blood spattered jewelry still sticky with the blood of its wearers. Someone just hit you in the ass with a board with a nail through it.

"What is this, the middle ages?!" you say, bringing down the side of your fist like a hammer onto a youth's head. Before he's even hit the ground you kick his head back up and beat him back down with the butt of your gun. His necklace is fake, you can tell by the weight of it. You take it anyways, the accumulation making one side of your pants droop down like the side of Barney's face.

You switch to your sniper rifle and shoot through the window and part of the way down the street, hitting a couple of goons who tried to make a run for it. No one survives, not while you're here. The transverse of the spine with a machete. When a stomach is blown open, it's filled with puke. Trying to be profound is like forcing yourself to vomit. You try really fucking hard and all you end up with is a smelly pile and pain.

You kick open the door to a room, having busted the lock with sheer force, and on the inside you see two little goons making the damn stuff, the krokadil. The smell of iodine makes your eyes water and soon enough you're walking into the dark room and kicking over the table of liquids and glass onto the two frozen guys. How could they not hear what was going on outside? How could they be so oblivious? Underneath their goggles their eyes are ringed red. You back out of the room in relative confusion before spraying the doorway and the walls too.

Overkill, what a funny word, a funny saying. You can never kill someone too much. Kill em with a sniper rifle, kill them with a blunt ax, either way they're dead.

"Gunnar!" Yin is screaming, behind you? In front of you? You're ears are ringing from the shooting, the frequency you'll never hear again magnified as the little fibers in your ear die. You whirl around and almost fall on your ass, half because of the sleeve of some tracksuit wearing thug and half because your blood is on the ground, from both your ass blood and the bullet sitting in your thigh. The heat of the battle is over, you're floating back down, the pain in your leg is intensified. You want to grit your teeth to fight it but you also like how nice your teeth are so you just leave your jaw slack.

It looks like you've had your period, all the blood on your ass and your pants. Tampon, anyone? You still haven't found the rest of the guys, you're frantic, did Yin call you because he needed help? The house must be quiet by now, your ears are ringing so you can't quite tell. You don't see any movement, and you feel your two wounds pumping out little drops of blood with your heart. The more frantic you get, the more blood pours out of your wounds. This truth makes everything worse, your head is pounding now and you see red on the outer rims of your eyes. Not angry red, another sort of red. Your heart beat and the ringing is all you feel, all your hear, and you laugh just to see if anything can penetrate the wall of silence created by your body processes. It doesn't work, you're left even more frantic.

Your exterior is cool as you limp around the house, the barrel of your still warm gun leading you. You don't notice your lip is split and your nose is bleeding until you taste blood and lick it off your lips. You're not in good shape, Gunnar.

Sit down, the floor's nice and comfortable. Just push that guy over and have some shut eye. Take a little nap, everything'll be fine. Is that Barney? Never mind, he can wait, just go to sleep. Your hands are nice and warm, right? Leaning against the wall isn't enough, you sort of want to lay down. Your eyes are barely open and your vision is white, whiter... there's a little balloon in the corner, you see it. It's pink and deflated and it shouldn't fucking be there. You open your eyes a little more, sit up, fuck, you really don't want to. Why is it there?

Hale and Toll are holding you by each strap of your kevlar vest. Lee looks like he's getting carried out by Yin... or is it the other way 'round? You can't think, everything feels like it's been immersed in glue. The client... you're all moving to a helicopter...

Then you're not. You're sitting there and looking at the balloon still, that deflated thing. You want a drink, you want a warm shower of all things. Barney is saying something, his lopsided face stuck in a scream. You feel the bruises under your kevlar, there's blood coming from your arm too.

Life is beautiful. Really, it is. Full of beauty and illusions. Life is great. Without it, you'd be dead.

His face is loose and hanging with surprise. Or maybe he's trying not to grind his teeth.

He looks like a marionette when he runs.


	4. Chapter 4

Before you open your eyes, there's that swift feeling of falling out of a dream and into that twilight sleep. For all intents and purposes, you're still sleeping, your body anyways. You can hear yourself snore, you can feel how heavy your limbs are. Everything feels like it's made of wet sand, and it's not too long before burning holes of pain appear. You envision them as red rings jutting outward like the audio symbol that's been used since the era of walkmans and even before. Rings on a pond of lava. You want to move to get away from your own pain. That would disturb the half sleep, the time when your mind is more conscious than your body. Instead you crane your ears and listen. The ringing is gone.

Your father worked the late shift as a bathroom attendant. Your father was mugged on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. For the rest of his days on earth, your father never celebrated this holiday.

Keep brushing your teeth and you will always be a happy person.

Your face hurts, it's pained, it feels like someone hit it in with a sledge hammer and maybe that's not too far from the truth. Your name is Gunnar Jensen and that's not really your name. You were born in 1957 in Sweden. One day in second grade someone dared you to climb up on a tree. You did it, alright, but then you cried when you had to get back down, the principal came and got you then gave you a slap in the face. Climbing trees is against the rules, he said. You said you didn't know. Slap. From then on you think that maybe saving someone because you want to and because you have to is different. It was a Thursday and you were wearing the gray school uniform with the white shirt. From then on you tried your best to be nice to that shoddy old principal, but he was always a bastard to you back. He's dead, for sure. Or alive on machines, or frozen in some state. Either way, that's all dead anyways. How about you? Probably not. You know all that, alright. Maybe it'd be good if you opened your eyes.

Not just yet you think. Alright, fine, whatever. Can you feel this?

Your cheek is twitching and only then do you strain your ears. It's dark in the room, pea soup darkness that happens when you pull down shades over windows. The dark feels sludgy and unclean. Used diaper flavored darkness.

Waking up means the hurt that's encircling your body becomes more real and without that tension of battle to make it go away it hurts. You've stopped snoring. Then you get the idea to wake up like you're waking up from a nightmare.

Gasping you sit up. Ouch! Fuck! Ahhhrg you scream. Maybe that wasn't such a good idea, huh? You're in your own apartment, still in the bloody black clothes you wore to get raid the krokadil den. The bastards must have patched you up and dropped you off. The only difference is the Kevlar vest ain't on you anymore, it's on the floor along with your guns. You picture Hale and Toll Road dragging you in here and dumping you on the couch. How long have you been out?

When you go to lift your arm and run it through your hair, it hurts like a bitch, holy shit, it hurts so fucking much. Swears in three languages come flying out of your mouth, none of them in english. You've been here so long you've almost lost your accent. It comes off sounding like a soft pallet irregularity rather than a sign of where you were born, where you were raised, where the fat balding principal of your school dragged you out of a tree twice as tall as you are now, standing on a ladder.

You're sitting on the couch now, peeling off your sweaty socks with the hand that doesn't hurt to move. Your apartment is filthy, flies buzzing over dirty dishes and dirty underwear draped over things like doilies.

Sound familiar?

An hour later you get up and labor over to the phone. You dail the number of the scumbag who decided it was a good idea to drop off your shot up, bruised, nail in the assed body to your apartment. Barney fucking Ross.

"Gunnar" he says before you can even say anything. He sounds tired and like his face is swollen, then again, he always does. They say that you can still hear shit when you're in a coma, but what's the use of hearing if you can't process it, can't appreciate it. You clear your throat.

"Why am I half dead in my apartment?" Cutting off Barney is easy, he's never been that quick a talker. Never been that quick a thinker either.

"Where else were we gonna put you?" Good point, maybe you haven't thought this grievance call through yet. Your exhale into the receiver of your phone is so heavy that the mouthpiece is wet by the time you're done.

"Are we paid?" You've abandoned your old angle.

"We don't get paid for failing missions." he's wiping his eyes, you can see it in your head.

"What." It's not a question, it's a dry exclamation.

"You were upstairs dealing with the track suits, we all were down looking for the target. He was in a room upstairs still cooking. You took him out." It's plain, there's no anger in his voice, this wouldn't be the first time a mission has been fucked up. Without the contact there wasn't much to go on, you couldn't have known what the guy even looked like. He wasn't an award winner, he was a nobody with a fuzzy family picture from 5 years ago to look at. Generic. You're convincing yourself and your mouth feels dry and numb. You open it to say something then close it again. This isn't the first time a mission has been fucked up, it's the first time you've done it on accident though. Vilena.

"Our contact got snuffed, things were fucked from the beginning. Thing is, they know how to do it themselves, we're gonna be dealing with them again. Only a matter of time. I already accepted another mission out there, 5 weeks, we all gotta heal and rest first." You know he's not blaming you but he still is. Barney Ross is just a little bit full of shit.

You good, Gunnar?

You hang up the phone. Tired of that phrase and how it's burned into your fucking head, tired of how it is and how it works. You feel dead and sad and terrible inside. Rotted out and moldy. It's 1 p.m. You stagger to the closest pile of floor laundry (it goes there dirty or clean) and yank on some jeans and lousy sweat stained white thermal. You put on a shitty dress shirt, wrinklier than Trench Mauser's balls.

You contemplate showering, removing the bloodied bandages, whatever. It seems like too much effort and you really just want to get to the bar and get some whiskey on the rocks inside you, maybe a white russian just for shits and giggles. You could really use a hit of a little something something, you're sure that if you stumbled into a hospital claiming to have been mugged, you could get some Vicodin. The last fucking thing you want is to have all these cunts on your ass though, it's like they know as soon as you're under the influence of anything that isn't booze or Excedrin plus.

Fuck, you remember those necklaces you nabbed from the fuckers in Russia. There's all clumped together and sticky with your blood and blood that isn't yours. You're reminded of a king rat, where all rats get their tails knotted and stuck together, then they finally die that way. You never knew why they were called that, kings, because it seems like a lowly shitty way to die, your tail stuck, fighting and gnawing with a bunch of other fuckers stuck in the same sort of place. Like that scene in Watership Down where that one rabbit dreams of all the other ones dying in their tunnels, piled together and starved to death. Damn, for a kid's movie that sure was gruesome. Why did you even see it? You have a vague memory of being passed out in front of a television, or close to it, and that movie playing in front of your half lidded eyes. They say that when you're in a coma, you can still hear.

Can you feel this?

You're going through the bloodied pockets of your black pants and you snag all the chains you can, sticky and wet. You're checking the other pocket when you find a deflated pink balloon.

That shouldn't be there you're thinking.

You throw it away, no need for it, no use for it. For a couple seconds your life was a film directed by Roman Polanski, but those seconds are over and now you're just Gunnar again, selling loot from bodies to make up for the fact that you weren't paid for a mission you fucked up singlehandedly.

You couldn't have known. It's easier to fool yourself than you might think. Sometimes all it takes is willpower, other time it takes a trip to your plastic surgeon. You make a point to inquire as to why Barney's right eyebrow is permanently surprised. Or was it his left? Asking questions you already know the answer to is fun. Hell, teachers do it all the damn time. Correcting people who are wrong is a quick way to stay on top. Shit, you're thinking too much to distract yourself from the balloon which is now in the trash on top of an ancient piece of pizza. What if you're still back there leaning against that wall, dying, and this is all just a dream?

Maybe you've been watching too many fucking movies lately, Gunnar. Get your goddamn head in check, the last thing you need is to fall off the wagon, end up kicked off the team for good. Years of killing have frayed you a little bit, that's for damn sure. Nightmares that feel more real than not, jumping at nothing, sleeping with a gun under your pillow. You weren't always a heavy boozer, the time when you first started chewing Excedrin for a headache you didn't have was less than 6 years ago. You remember pretty easy when you started going off the deep end, when things started being harder to forget. You're not like Tool, you're not going to stop and open up a shitty little business even though you have the choice.

Every addict has the choice to quit, and the truth is you're addicted to the killing, feeling your gun get hot in your hands.

People think you're not an addict anymore just because you're not actively shooting poison into your body at semi-regular intervals. Truth is, you'll be an addict for the rest of your life, whether it's active or dormant. Dormant, that's what they call the black hole in the middle of the galaxy, just waiting to start up again and suck us all in. You can't kill an addiction, you can't change the chemical make up of your brain so it's not always going to take to things so easy. Thing about active addicts, they've taken their fate into their own hands. Down the road, they know how they're gonna die no matter what they're addicted to. You, it's just a matter of years until you're blown away by some lucky mook holding a pistol. If not that, a relapse will kill you, cirrhosis of the liver, scarring on your stomach from all the Excedrin you take.

It's like being an AI in a video game. You still know your fate but you go rushing towards the thing that's gonna kill you.

Addiction is only a problem if you're banking on living a long time, and Gunnar, you're not.

The pawn shop owner doesn't talk except to offer you 10 grand for all the jewelry. You take it, in cash, and store it in a side bag of your bike. Perhaps it's not the best way to keep your money secure, however you've not had an incident with it yet. Your bike is ill maintained enough so that people won't think there's much in it. It's not custom, it's not much of anything but a 2005 Harley.

Motorcycles used to be a sign of rebellion or some kind of biker gang affiliation. Now only the rich can afford them. Dentists and lawyers riding around on their bikes outfitted with custom skulls and what not. Barney fits right in, the bastard. Lee's bike is some jap shit, or some brit shit, either way it's not a Harley therefore it's shit. Fuck that, you'd rather ride around in a station wagon with vainer on the sides than one of those shitty bikes, that's for damn sure.

You walk into the bar, crusted blood on your arm, the side of your face. You probably need stitches in some places, but the wounds have been open long enough that stitching them would just sew any infection inside to fester. You're better off showering and putting neosporin on 'em. You won't actually do that though, instead you won't change the clothes you're wearing for a couple of weeks, and when you finally peel them off you'll hope that the wounds are closed, or that they haven't healed to the fabric of your shirt. That's happened a few times, that's the worst.

You're on one of the bar stools, downing whiskey in short order to make up for the sobriety you were forced into for the duration of your mission. That was a bitch, wasn't it? The burn of the whiskey washes the bitterness of the previously chewed Excedrin down your throat. You slap the bar, signalling for another one, sometimes peering up at the muted news above the bar. Nothing interesting is happening and nothing interesting continues to happen. Someone Else's blood is under your fingernails.

After a second drink, you'll take another two Excedrine. Another couple drinks, another couple of Excedrin. This'll help you unwind and get through the day. Novartis Consumer Inc. thanks you for your patronage.

There are a lot of ways of committing suicide without _dying_ dying.


	5. Chapter 5

It takes a lot of drinks to make a big man like you unable to uncross his eyes, and here you are, calling Barney for a ride. One more pull over for a DUI, and buddy, you're a pedestrian for 10 years whether you like it or not. You wipe your mouth and then wipe the crusted blood off your hand on your pants. Society likes you to be clean so they can pretend you're not all filthy. If we're clean we can pretend we're not animals killing each other with glorified sling shots. Chimps have been known to build tools. Chimps are also known to eat insects off their kin. You hear the ringing noise around 6 times.

In New Orleans, bars aren't required to close at any time, sometimes they stay open 24/7. It's 4 a.m., the Old Point bar is done for, you, their last patron, were thrown out on your ass. Figuratively, not literally, and that's the truth. You don't want Barney to bring you home, you want him to drive you six miles up the road so you can go into this other bar, the one always filled with young kids as opposed to crusty old bikers. It's not your scene, sure, but there's no dress code, and it's 24 fucking hours a day, seven motherfucking days a week. It's a tourist joint, every time you go in, some drunk 20 something gets enamored with you, because you're huge and old, and sometimes you even get laid.

Barney finally picks up, you can hear the phone fumble around. You don't know what sort of shape he's in after the raid, but if he's well enough to call you, he's well enough to drive you somewhere, right?

"What the fuck do you want?" His tired voice makes you laugh hysterically and he ends up hanging up the phone 15 seconds later.

You feel more than a little bit stupid. There's that part of you that doesn't like rolling your shoulders to release the tension in your neck like Barney does 20 times a fucking minute because it makes you feel like a cunt, that part's surfaced and now you feel like a hamfisted douchenuckle. You're sitting outside this closed bar, this fucking bar that only caters to older white man and whatever woman they see fit to bring with them, and you don't know what to do with yourself. It's Louisiana, New Orleans, the city that was fucking demolished by Hurricane Katrina and rose from the ashes of itself, and it's hot and sticky at night. There's that wafting odor of shrimp and shitty restaurants, commercialized Cajun food. That part's on top now and all you can do is loathe everything you see.

You wanna burn it to the fucking ground, you wanna let the fires rage and consume this entire whored out place.

This is the part of you that heats up heroin in a spoon and injects it in the place where your nutsack meets your leg. This is the same part of you that knows that heroin is so pure it doesn't have to be heated up anymore. The part of you that knows the difference between black tar heroin and the regular shit. The part of you that speedballs on a night when it's boring. It's the same fucking part of you that runs into battle with a devil may care attitude. The part of you that fumbles with women and makes stupid jokes. Because the truth is, it's not a part of you, it's all of you. You can't amputate the part of you that's always gonna be a drug addict because that would be suicide. Doctor's can't amputate torsos, doctors can't amputate heads. The infection is in your fucking blood.

Being a drug addict isn't a title, it's not a disease, a temporary state of being. It's a persona.

Your Dad was one of those angry drunks where he would get mad and smack around his wife. He had that blonde comb over, his name was Hans, he beat your mother like a dog at least once a week. You, the only child, you got it all the fucking time too. That angry mad part of your Dad who drank and smashed a bottle over his own head and then kicked your cat until it fucking died, that's you. You can super impose your own face over his and not see the difference at all. You hate that name, Hans. Your mother always wanted grandchildren.

Parenthood is the opiate of the masses.

You're watching the sun come up from your place in front of this bar that opens at noon, your drunkenness slipping away. Nothing is as perfect as you imagine it, and if you're romanticizing your life, you can't even imagine how bad it would be in the eyes of another person.

Let me tell ya, Gunnar, it ain't pretty, that's for damn sure.

You lick your teeth. There's no one else here to distract you, no one else to focus on, there's just you and bone deep regret. Regret for what? Dropping out of MIT, not shacking up with some chick from New York and starting a family, turning into a 55 year old bachelor who hangs out in front of closed bars in the wee hours of the morning. It's times like this when it's hard not to feel just a little bit disgusted with yourself. There's no Barney here to yank up your zygomaticus muscle at, no Toll Road here to pity because he hates himself more than any of you ever will. You're here alone and your crushing fucking loneliness is only going to fester and turn into something pretty ugly, something that's gonna turn into you punching the first guy who says you look stupid sitting here in the face until he fucking dies.

You want to be on a mission, you want to be firing your grenade launcher and bisecting ugly black pirates.

On a mission you're a god, deciding the difference between life and death. Here you're a recovering addict with a chip on his shoulder and a hair across his ass.

You stand up, the sun is rising and you pretty flattering in the light, lemme tell ya.

You're sober enough to drive, you think. You also know that when you think that it probably means you shouldn't be driving because that false confidence fucks you up worse than knowing your dead drunk is.

You could walk six miles or you could walk 4 miles. Go to the bar or crash at Tool's parlor and let him scrape you off the floor after you raid his booze. It's better to choose the quicker way to death, so you start fucking running. The wound in your ass, your left fucking asscheek, that fucker reopens as soon as you start. Every molecule of your skeleton is telling you to stop, crying, screaming out in pain. You don't give a flying fuck, because there's no scar to show for happiness, no way to remember sweetness except for pictures and your own flawed memories. Just another stupid moment people have to make last forever.

100 feet later you can't run anymore. It's a baptism of your own sweat.

By the time you're at Tool's you're practically crawling.

The funny thing about Tool is he does not, in fact, like Tool. Neither do most people who aren't cunts, but that's an opinion, not a fact.

Everyone's always telling you you're a dumb fucking bastard, you're an asshole, you're this you're that. If the shoe doesn't fit, you'll shrink to fit it.


	6. Chapter 6

Meth is processed by the kidneys, not the liver. It's less risky to do meth because it's easier to get kidneys than a whole liver. You can live without a kidney. When you get a kidney transplant, they keep the old ones in there. In World War II, the Nazis used meth. Hitler might've too. Meth psychosis, that's the best, you're paranoid, you're hallucinating, you're twitching, you're losing your shit. For heroin, there's Requiem for a Dream, Trainspotting, Drugstore Cowboy, Naked Lunch, Permanent Midnight, The Basketball Diaries, The People vs. Larry Flynt and Sid and Nancy. What is there for meth? A bunch of shitty demotivational pictures online. There's no fashion niche called "Meth Chic". A meth pipe is called a glass dick. Being a recovering heroin addict makes you like Renton from Trainspotting. Being a recovering meth addict just means that you did something fucking stupid and that your teeth are probably made of porcelain. There's no cool stories about smoking meth, there's nothing chic about it, nothing adventurous or socially interesting about being a wired up greasy crystal meth addict. There's social rejection, there's lying to yourself until you've changed that entire history. Smoking meth might as well be fist fucking your grandmother and paying to do it, in the eyes of the media. Heroin, it's interesting, they make movies about that. Movies that glorify it. Authors that loved it. Meth just has depressing documentaries and shitty A&E specials. For every pound of meth cooked, there's 6 pounds of toxic waste created. It takes a hundred and fifty grand to clean up a meth site. Sound familiar? Does any of this ring a bell?

Fooling yourself, tickling yourself, same fucking thing. You can pretend it's working easily enough, but everyone knows you're full of shit except you, especially after you've been doing it for so long.

You good, Gunnar?

The definition of pathetic is being prodded awake by Tool's flamboyant suede boots. You can see the knife sticking out of it. You drooled a little in your sleep and it's crusted on the stubble of your chin and in a little almost dried puddle on the floor.

Today is the sort of day when the sun only comes up to humiliate you.

"Wake up, brother." that term of endearment sort of pisses you off, makes you a wee bit uncomfortable for some reason. Can you feel this? You slap both your hands down and roll over on your side, stretching. All the while your blue eyes are staring up from under your brow, the Alex DeLarge, Jack Torrance patented Kubrick Stare.

"I'm up, I'm up."

"You, uh, want a shower or somethin', brother?" You look like a zombie and smell like old bowling shoes. You're a stubborn bastard, but you're not that stubborn. Declining a shower would make you look stupid, like you're leaving all this dirt and blood on you to get pitied purposefully. Hell no, you don't want pity from little shits who don't know how to fire a gun, you don't want pity from little shits who've never sucked on the glass dick or injected with a dirty syringe in a public bathroom.

No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.  
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.  
This is all practice.

Five minutes later you're in Tool's shower, above the parlor, and you're so damn tall that the spray is hitting you in the neck instead of on the head. Truth is, you don't like showering that much, the process of getting undressed and climbing into the thing, but once you're in the shower it feels so good you have to force yourself back out. After awkwardly bending your legs so your hair can get into the spray, you shut off the water. It dawns on you that Tool doesn't have any bandages in his medicine cabinet. You proceed to rip apart a towel and use that on your ass, leg and arm. There's little droplets of blood on the side of his stall shower now, you won't bother to clean it up though, he offered. Yanking your clothes back on sucks.

There's a couple Excedrin half dissolved by steam in your jeans. You pop both in your mouth and are deeply unsatisfied when they don't crunch in your mouth. They're soft, they just sort of get smeared around your mouth, bitter frosting. The smell of Barney's over expensive cigars hits your nose. It's 7 p.m., you were sleeping for 11 hours or so. You're descending down the stairs and you see that the entire team is there. Cool, great, maybe there's jobs that don't involve huge drug dens available, jobs that won't be a waste of time and ammo, jobs that you won't fuck up. They're all looking at you.

"I heard a joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life is harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world. Doctor says, Treatment is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go see him. That should pick you up. Man bursts into tears. Says, But doctor I am Pagliacci. Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains."

Everyone's still looking at you.

"Well, what the fuck, you gonna laugh or not?" You're sitting down now.

"Gunnar, are you using again?" it's a question, not a statement like last time. You're fucking taken aback, is what you are. He sees it on your face. Before you can say no and go on a tirade, he nods. He just had to ask, he says, just had to make sure. You go on a tirade anyways.

When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.

"You think it's fucking easy, kicking it? Huh? Fuck, I didn't fuck up the mission because my feet weren't on the ground. I fucked it up because we had no fucking contact. I thought those were two run of the mill junkies in there. What can I even say, Barney? The fuck, I already said I was sorry, do you want me on my knees sucking your dick?" The last part makes everyone decidedly uncomfortable, except for Barney himself, who keeps his face frozen. Christmas clears his throat, Toll Road, that well-read pretentious motherfucker, he's reading some shit on his phone. Barney slaps the table with one of his tiny carnie hands and slides over a file. The silence is pregnant and ripe, the intake of breath of a woman before she starts pushing.

Barney likes to take these rebound missions, when another team fails or one of you fucks it up. These missions that tie up loose ends. He's a white fucking knight, alright, not the kind that just likes killing, but the type that feels its his duty to make everything right with a place.

"Dealing with this shit again... it's no good Barney." Toll's taken his head out of his ass and put his phone away.

"Mauser can play clean up on this one." Hale's jumping on board with Toll. Something inside you really wants to do this mission, even if it's going to mean running around in the winter.

"How much will we get paid?" asks Yin, the greedy yellow man.

You shift in your chair, because you need to take a leak. Christmas is watching you out of the corner of his eye. Barney's droopy eyes are scanning the file.

"You told me you already accepted and we'll be out in five weeks." You're tentative, with how you choose your wording.

"I did already accept." Barney says shortly. A collective groan is expelled from the entire team.

"So five weeks then?" Hale asks, leaning back in his chair and cracking his knuckles. You're not sure, but you think Hale has a woman at home, a wife. He has a cut above his eyebrow with butterfly stitches in it, a black eye on the same side. Barney's teeth are gritting, it's audible from where you are, across the table. People in a coma, they can still hear, you've heard. Everyone's in their own personal coma, everyone can find ways of committing suicide without DYING dying.

"Barney, this is a mess, a political tar baby. There's a reason no one else wants to do this. The Russian government isn't restricting the sales of cold medicine, which they're using to make the shit, because the pharmaceutical companies have them by the fucking balls. It's useless, Russia is a fucking mess, man. Let someone else clean up that pile, let's go somewhere warm." Toll Road, the know nothing know it all, he finally stepped up to the fucking plate. Barney nods, his face still working. The team, it's always been a democracy, when it comes to making decisions. Like ancient Athens.

"I don't like the sounds of it." Whoa, Christmas finally grew some balls and disagreed with Barney. You're a little bit surprised.

"Russia has the amount of junkies in the world." you say, smirking.

"And the most white supremacists." Hale adds. You laugh a little, because leave it up to the black guy to bring it up. Tool's off in the corner, wiping out the inside of a pint. Craning your neck, you look behind at him and he nods, bringing you a beer.

"Here, brother." you nod in thanks.

"Isn't it early?" says Yin, raising an eyebrow. Next to Barney like that, it's sort of comical. You shrug and suck the foam off the top.

"This isn't gonna go away, we're gonna end up doing this whether we like it or not." Barney sounds irritated and doleful.

"Fine, postpone it then." Christmas dismisses. "You got anything else?"

"Nothing big, a few small things, no one that wants to meet our price."

"Fuck it then." You have more money than you know what to do with, because you're not spending it on much.

The ripe pregnancy is there again, you don't know what to do. You're waiting for Barney to go well, there is something... and yank out a file. In the entire history of man, there's only been 26 years of world peace, all together.

"Nothing in Burma?" You liked Burma, how wild it was.

"Itching for another case of trench foot?" Toll asks, you let it go. Barney shakes his head.

"He just likes Asians, failed Casanova." There's a collective laugh, but it's weak. You've almost downed your pint.

For once, there's no reason for you all to be gathered like this. It's too soon after a mission, you haven't started to miss each other yet. Like it or not, these guys are the only reason you haven't relapsed yet. They're your support system, they need you less than you need them, that's the truth. You'll never admit it.

"You want more of those letters done?" asks Tool to Barney.

"Damn chicken." mutters Christmas. Barney takes off his shirt and the entire table recoils a little bit. It's not the prettiest sight, that's for damn sure. Tool starts in.

"If you squint your eyes a little, it looks like a skull with a comb over." you're squinting, rhytides deepening around your eyes. Hale squints too and brings up his mentalis muscle, nodding. Soon everyone's squinting at Barney's back. Then everyone's laughing.

"Hey, Gunnar says something funny for once." Yin points out. You glow with pride.

"Stop moving brother, unless you want a line going down your back." Barney grimaces at that, but hell, the idea of a stray line sounds good to you. Maybe he'll take off his shirt a little bit less.

You stretch your arms above your head and Caesar and Road both move back, respectively.

"Put those things away." says Road. You blink and shrug, downing the rest of your pint.

Truth is, you like these guys and they like you. Even if they've been tiptoeing around you ever since you tried to kill Yin. Without them, if Barney hadn't taken you back after the Vilena mission, you'd have pissed away your savings and you'd probably be bouncing some bar right now, making enough money to bu xanax and valium from rich housewives. Barney may be a smarmy vain motherfucker who desperately doesn't want to get old, Toll may be a self loathing fucker who needs intellectual validation like you need oxygen, Yin might be a greedy liar, but in the end you like 'em all. You've never really had a problem with Hale. Most of the time you don't have an opinion on him, but he always seems to be looking out for you, which is nice. Big Black Brother is watching you.

Can you feel this, Gunnar? It's called being content.


	7. Chapter 7

Author's Note: Everyone that's been reading and enjoying it so far, this note is for you. Romance is a funny thing because regularly it pretends to be something else.

* * *

You've been holed up in your own private purgatory for three weeks, whether it be the couch you sleep on or the bar. Staring into your reflection, watching a movie for the 70th time, doing the same shit every day, your brain knows it so well it refuses to process what's going on. Throw a wrench in it, and all that's left is your own yearning for something familiar. Human beings are animalistic enough to like some sort of routine, but at the same time we crave originality, we crave something different. The same repeated motions give way to apathy. Pain, cold, it all just turns into a spike your brain sends to your body. Talking with other people turns into the same thing every time, a hashing out of the same old tired arguments. Old people talk about the weather so much because it's the only variable left in their lives.

Did the perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

You're bent over a warming drink at the bar, your breath heating up the glass and fogging it a little. You're moving your jaw back and forth, front and back. You want to start a fight, you want to get laid, you want the sweet rush of chemicals pumping through you. Yin went to China to try to get away from it, from the boringness of real life between missions. He was back 2 weeks after the Sang mission. It's the same everywhere. You lean back in your chair and squint up at the nightly news. Nothing interesting, as usual, some red headed celebrity getting dragged back into rehab. You can't figure out what's so fashionable about luke warm showers and sitting in a circle with a bunch of other rejects, but for some reason young Hollywood seems to find the entire process endearing.

Barney... you wonder if he's gotten his face pumped up with what's for all intents and purposes, a toxin. Whoever is doing his less intrusive plastic surgeries, they're a hack. You're pretty sure you could mix up something twice as good as commercially available botox at half the price. When's the last time he's gotten something injected? Six months ago? Eight? You can always tell because his face looks more frozen than usual.

When you're constantly thinking about your boss and his plastic surgery ventures, take a drink. Cram some Excedrin in your mouth while you're at it. Hell, you're not even sure if you see one female over at the Old Point Bar tonight, and that's both depressing and a solid reflection on the clientele. It can only take a moment to waste the rest of your life.

After a while, after the midpoint of your life, there's nothing good on the horizon. The only thing you have to look forward to is growing old and infirm and dying smeared in your own shit in some care facility. That's why you're all still going, Benedict Arnold, as he died in his bed, he begged to die in battle, he wanted to. In the end, one or all of you are going to get snuffed by some lucky shit with a gun, and that's better. Maybe not Hale, with his wife, or Toll Road, maybe not Lee Christmas with his little Lacy, not even Yin. You, Barney, Trench, hell, even Booker, you're in it to the end and it's sour. Sure, you like to pretend that you're better than everyone else because you don't NEED this, but the fact of the matter is, that it's your only way out. Because 10 years ago was when the future turned from being a promise to a threat. 10 years ago was when The Expendables got on top and fucking stayed there. It's only a matter of time until more and more of you stop being able to function and new teams take the cake.

At some point, the memories, your adventures, they'll be the only thing you have left.

The trick to immortality is creating a legacy. Yours just happens to be draped in blood. It won't be something you hear about on the national news, it won't be something you hear about on the radio. It'll be hushed and quiet from team to team. You like to pretend that you're okay with that fate, everyone getting whittled around until only Ross remains and you're all his backup singers, really though, you're not. It's better than dropping dead in some residential care unit, is it?

If we're remembered more for what we destroy instead of what we create, what will you have turned into in 30 years, when you're long gone? The crazy guy who sold out his team? The chemically imbalanced drug addict? If that's all you'll be in the eyes of history, why stop using at all? They're all questions you don't have an answer to, all questions that ride on something that hasn't even happened yet.

You'll never be as young as you are tonight, and you're here pissing it away in some shitty biker bar. It's always smelled like moldy peanuts and motor oil in this joint. You throw a crumpled up 20 dollar bill in your glass and leave. It's December, but it's also Louisiana, it's warm.

Your entire team, who will they be after they die? Barney will probably grow about 5 inches, his face won't be distorted by plastic surgery. His tattoos won't be as ugly, he'll be a competent leader. He'll turn into a white knight, a protector of women, famous for when he gave his earnings to some little brown chick on an island the world at large don't care about. He'll be the one who valued his own work over women, turning away Maggie (who of course will have nerves of steel) for his own Road's ears will become more and more ridiculous with each telling, everyone will know he was so in love with his pain that he was unable to leave it behind. He won't be the bookish little shit he is. Hale will turn into a big black giant, no one will know about the little razor he kept in his pocket, his quiet jokes, his sense of humor. Yin will get smaller and smaller, to the point where he doesn't use guns any more, faster and faster, more and more unable to speak English. His shortfalls will become points of interest. Lee Christmas will become so British it hurts, so pumped up and ready for action, so focused on his girlfriend that it'll become a funny joke.

You? Well, you'll be the biggest fuck up of them all. You can see yourself, sickly skin, greasy, dirty, huge in stature, crazy. It's not too far off from where you are now. You can't make what's already a caricature any more ridiculous without sacrificing the foundation.

It's so easy to laugh at yourself, laugh at others, when they're nice and far away.

Reality means you live until you die. No one wants that, no one wants to tell stories of a bunch of mostly normal guys. They want to hear about a bunch of insane old men firing guns at speeds unheard of, doing missions and never getting shot, never getting hurt. They want to remove the human component from the people, turn them into gods of the gun. Deities of Death.

You're not stupid, Gunnar. Sure, maybe everyone wants you to be because it fits, big stupid guy who happens to be educated. You're more aware than they think, you know what awaits their images down the road. What awaits them, the people? Probably some sort of May, December romance, shaking up with some girl and dying a few years later, leaving her a fuck ton of money to piss away.

More and more it feels like you're doing a bad impersonation of yourself.

Right now, you want to get laid. You want to lay on your back and let her do all the damn work. It's easy to make up these pretend thoughts to soothe yourself so you don't have to face the real problem head on. Every time you snag yourself a little woman, you tell yourself you love them but really you're both using each other. She's using you for your bank account and cheating on you while you're on missions, you're using her for the intimacy you crave. Then, when she drops you, it's like coming down from a high, both the best feeling and the worst feeling rolled into one. You're yanked out of your personal coma and slammed into the wall of reality. For every mission, there's a scar, for every relationship, nothing's learned because nothing lasts. The dents in your bank account are filled, the space next to you in bed cold to the touch. There's nothing permanent.

You can feel the wind whipping through the hair you don't dye as you're driving back to your apartment. Going back to your dirty hovel is like dumpster diving. There's so many new bits of trash and garbage that show up out of nowhere, sometimes you wonder if you have an extremely reclusive roommate. There's a joke in there somewhere, you tuck it away into that corner of your mind you reserve for the puerile shit you drag out for the rest of them.

You find a letter, it almost looks like a bill in how it's packaged. There's a little clump at the bottom of it, a little sandy feeling thing. You know what it is before you're even done dragging the knife through the top of the envelope.

Assisted suicide, without _dying_ dying.

Enjoy is all the little note says. It's typed in New Times Roman, looks like size 11 or 12 to you, you're no computer expert. In the bag that's barely big enough to fit a quarter in, there's a bit of grainy yellowish powder, like little rocks. You don't feel it yet, but there's sweat coming down your face. Your mouth is watering, your nose is running, every part of you wants to get out a marker, get out a pen, you want to smoke it so bad. Your hand is shaking a little bit and in an instant, you hurl the baggie across your apartment with all the force you can muster. The exclamation point was either condescending or forceful.

You're barely thinking when you slam the door to your apartment, grabbing the keys to an Audi you've driven all of twice.

It could be Trench, the competitor with a chip on his shoulder. It could be Church, the dispatcher with a hair across his ass about the mess that was Vilena. It could be some new anti-villian, here to try and bring the team down. You knock on Barney's door with the side of your fist. The time is 12:18 P.M. You don't realize that your mother died 6 years ago today.

Barney opens the door. White tee shirt, tacky necklace, jeans. Either he just got back from the bar or he's planning on going, you can't tell.

"Someone sent me a gram of meth." No use trying to pretend to be the suave heroin addict you aren't. Barney's eyes widen as much as his ruined face will let them.

"So you are using again." it's an observation, not a question. An assumption. A lie.

"No. I just got home and it was on my table." You're talking to him like you watch parents talk to their retarded children.

"Well who sent it?" Barney says, standing aside, letting you into his house.

"I don't know. Someone who wants to see us get fucked up. Probably someone who knows about Vilena." The name of the shitty island makes you recoil with your past actions.

"Gunnar, I think you're jumping to conclusions." A tired Barney says. He's back from the bar, you know that now. You suddenly feel very, very stupid. A little care package gets sent to you and you go running to your boss, the man who will probably never fully trust you again. You should have went to Yin, because at this point, maybe you deserve to get headbutted in the nuts by the little guy.

You realize that you're alone with Barney Ross and you suddenly feel very, very awkward.

"I'm getting a hotel. If I go back there I'm gonna end up smoking it."

"You do that."

You're out the door.

If you look up pathetic in the dictionary, there's a picture of Gunnar Jensen standing outside Barney Ross's house, a frown showing more in his eyes than if ever would in his face. What, had you expected to come over and play Scooby Doo, who planted the crank on your kitchen table?

The lady at the Best Western's front desk, she ran out of perkiness about 4 hours into her twelve hour shift. You're given a phone, an ice bucket, a can of Raid, and you're alone in that room again. That's how things end, you alone in some shitty room doing nothing, alone with your own thoughts.

The realization that everyone you love will either reject you or die dawns slowly.

You're taking all the little bottles of liquor out of the minibar and draining them one by one. It's sad, you sitting here and watching some Sitcom about a family who lives in Ohio or something. You don't really know why you feel so down, why you feel so damn broken, except you do. You won't admit it, you won't pick up the phone and call one of your six friends, there's nothing you're going to be able to do about it until the next mission roles around, the next job. You only hope it's somewhere warm. You can spend your whole life building a wall between you and anything real.

You've failed at being you.


	8. Chapter 8

It's never a question if you'll get work again. The question is when. Two weeks later Barney's taken on a relatively simple mission with a payout of six, that's one for each of you. You all have to escort a box as it's being delivered from point A to point B. What's in the box isn't important, the client says. It's being delivered on foot, of all things, two strong men at either side of the box, marching through the Egyptian sand. You're up ahead with Yin but behind you, Toll Road is explaining to Hale about his diagnosis of Avoidant Personality Disorder. You turn around, deciding to put your two sense in, throw yourself up a few pegs and kick Road down a couple notches.

"What are you looking at, Crankenstien?" News about the care package you found on your table has gotten around. Doesn't stop the pun from being more than slightly amusing.

"You ever think that your Shrink would just give your the diagnosis to make you feel special?" The look on Road's face is fucking priceless. It's a mixture between slow dawning and fury.

Truth is, you have a shrink too, but the issue with shrinks is that if you're smarter than the person trying to crack you open, trying to alter the course of your life, things get a little bit choppy. You go there every Thursday, you've been going for eight months now. Every session is pretty much the same, starting with you walking into the office at 5 p.m. and sitting down, at which point the shrink- Dr. Copal- says

"Gunnar, hello, come in, sit down." You've already done both and know that he's just trying to pretend he has control. When he doesn't have control, things get very scary for him. According to the DSM-IV, your shrink here, he has an anxiety disorder.

"Hey Doc." you say and immediately lean back in the leather chair, which makes it make a farting noise. Your ankle leaning on your knee, and Dr. Copal pretends to sift through some papers. You know that you're one of 5 clients he takes, all of you ex-special forces. Those papers? They have nothing of importance on them. You've checked.

"How've you been this week?" A question.

"Good." An answer.

A couple beats of silence, Dr. Copal, first name Frank, tapping on his oak desk with the top of his pen.

"Anything... of note to report?" You think about telling him how someone sent you crank, but you didn't last week. The question would inevitably come up as to why you didn't tell him last time. You don't want to open that particular can of worms.

"No." Your voice is much deeper than his, much stronger. He sounds sort of like he could sell things on the home shopping channel, things for men bought by their home bound spouses. Flamboyant enough to connect with the woman buying, but still in possession of a penis- proof that their husband, brother, cousin, whatever will like it.

More beats of silence.

"In animal cells, some cells are programmed to die from the minute they get created. It's called Apoptis, a fate ending in death that's predetermined." Your words are measured, but what essentially this is, is you blurting out random shit to fill the silence. The truth is, after a few minutes of being under Doctor Frank Copal PHD's glare, you start to sweat a little, start to get uncomfortable. This man is twenty years younger than you, he's never seen battle, he only knows how to treat you because of all sorts of text books. You're an educated man yourself, but you're not going out and trying to tell people who made lives with chemistry about chemistry. Practical knowledge isn't always the same as book knowledge. Copal, he's the only one who would take your case, the only one who would gamble with someone that was a merc. At the time it seemed like a relief, but now you wish that you could have just done this alone.

The thought that you'd be back where you started doesn't even occur to you.

"Any particular reason why you wanted me to know that, Gunnar?" He's writing on that fucking pad again. You purse your lips out and shake your head, shrugging. "Have you been seeing anyone?"

You always hate the whole world after you get laid. Every woman has a different sort of problem she wants to sort out while you're fall asleep after.

"The American Gold Rush, during it, there was a town called Bodey. Lawless place full of sacks of shit killin' each other. You'd go to a brothel, go to a bar- a saloon, if someone mentions having a man for breakfast, that means someone was killed there last night." This man is wrapped right around your fucking finger. It's his turn to feel uncomfortable. Harsh scrawls on the paper. Truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than the people born here. Goodbye God, I'm goin' to Bodey.

The little shit puts down his pen, stares up at you.

"Gunnar, frankly, I'm a little bit worried. It's been," he flips through that little fucking book, "eight months now, and you still haven't shown any progress, haven't opened up to me. You started coming here for a reason, because your... career was getting to you, making you use drugs, turning you into something less than a model citizen. You tried to kill two of your friends-"

You hold up a hand. You're really regretting having told him all that.

"I've also been clean for seven months and two weeks. I've also been doing my job like I did it before. I got everything back on track, and none of that is thanks to you or this office or any of it." You're getting a bit testy.

"How long 'till it happens again, Gunnar?" says Dr. Copal behind his big oak desk with the calender and the coffee mug ring on the side.

"It ain't gonna happen again."

"You don't know that." At which point you walk out of his office, because the hour is up, and go make another weekly appointment. The only reason you're doing this is to keep the rest of the team at bay. If Frank wants to slap the label of Bi-Polar on you, wants to dismiss the fact that you're not strung out on crank, let him. You'll endure it whether he wants to do anything useful or not. That's the truth. Same thing every fucking week, give or take.

This guy tells you to think about the rest of your life, what you're going to do with it, what you're going to do after you're done being a merc. You tell him it ain't happening, it's never going to stop for you. You tell him to take his 12 step programs and shove them up his loose little asshole, because the day you quit drinking is the day you die. When you're thinking about the rest of you're life, you're never really thinking about more than a few years down the road. You can't comprehend much more, can't hold it in your sites for but an instant. By the time you're thirty, you're already your own worst enemy, you stop working for yourself and start working against yourself. You want to break free of the persona you've built years making.

Get busy living or get busy dying. Once you're over a certain ridge, it's easier to do one than the other.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is known as a midlife crisis. That point where you stop getting more useful to society at large and start becoming less and less useful.

People think a midlife crisis, that it starts and ends. Really, it's just a slow descent downward 'till death, your masculinity slipping away along with whatever pride you might have held. Suddenly you can't do anything, no one even wants to make eye contact with you in public. You're stripped down to your core and what's left is nothing anyone wants to deal with. Truth is, without all our possessions and looks, without be able to do things, people are pretty fucking boring. Any of this sound familiar to you? Does this ring a bell?

In all Shakespeare's plays, the word lonely was only used once. It's the most awful word in the English tongue, alone. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell... hell is only a poor synonym.

You're not at that point yet. It's on the horizon though, rising like an eclipsed sun.

"Guuuuunar!" Yin is saying, waving a hand in front of your face. You blink and rear back a little, crossing your eyes in an attempt to see his hand in full focus.

"Wha-?" Shit, you got lost in your thoughts. "Got lost in my thoughts, it happens a lot when you're so smart."

"Ha! Maybe 30 years ago. Now? You dumb as a box of hammers!"

"Why you little..." The comical line, muttered ala Homer Simpson. You take a pretend swing above his head, he ducks anyways. A spot of relative brightness."We almost done with this, Barney?" He's already looking back at you, his face unreadable.

"Yeah Gunnar, almost done." This is an easy job for such a high price. You're wondering what's in the box, but really it's not important.

"Insect, did you have anything interesting to tell me, or did you just run out of people to bother?"

"Maybe if you weren't giant you'd notice a boot untied." he says, pointing. Shit, your boot is untied. You bend down to tie it.

"What's he doing?!" says one of the huge Egyptian men carrying the heavy case.

"I'm tying my shoe." you say, a little angry.

"Gunnar, watch it." Lee is whispering as he walks past you. You finish up and stand, ignoring the subtle pop in your knee. Both hands on your gun again, you're walking.

George Burns, he said that sex at age ninety is trying to shoot pool with a rope. The image, it creeps into your inner eye many times a day.

If we live long enough, we become a caricature of ourselves. A nothing, a puppet held together by plastic joints and scar tissue.

You think of Benedict Arnold, begging, pleading to be let on a battlefield to die in a way that wasn't so damn boring, a way that robbed pride like a highwayman in the night.

The best part of being a merc, one of the things that drew you to sucking on the devil's dick, well, you knew exactly how you were going to die. Now, there's only a 70% chance you'll get snuffed in battle, you think. You might be intelligent enough to rewrite A Briefer History of Time, challenge half its contents, bend numbers and bend space itself, but none of that will save you from a bullet to the head at point blank.

You don't know if that's worrisome or comforting. The idea of not being able to change your fate scares you, the idea of being free floating in a world that changes on a dime also scares you. If you think about it for too long you feel lost, detached, depersonalized and desensitized. That's when you start taking risks just to feel. It's a dark road with nothing at the bottom but a sheer cliff into dancing flames, that road is. Quickly, you turn away from it.

By the time you're fully aware again, you're laying down with your feet up on the plane, the foolish looking one that's older than Barney's great-great grandmother. Well, not really. Toll Road is ass deep in some Wally Lamb novel, the pretentious shit, Hale is messing around with his bullets that do more things than you have fingers, Lee and Barney, well, they're in the cockpit talking in hushed tones. Yin is texting a mile a minute on a phone that does so much you probably couldn't figure out how to use it without taking a class. You? Well apparently you've just been laying here. Your flask is empty and in your hands.

Floating away with your thoughts is something else entirely. In your thoughts, there's no difference between what's real and what you make up.

As the famous quote goes, must we dream our dreams and have them too?

Everyone's in their own personal coma.


	9. Chapter 9

Pop a couple Excedrin, swill a couple beers around in your mouth, repeat.

Tool's concrete shack gets more and more boring as time goes on. You remember when he first quit the team, when he first bought the place. You've always thought it was a fucking dump and your feelings toward it haven't improved much in the years sense. Slowly, it dawned on you that he wasn't going to be back, he wasn't going to get back on the team. Then came Lee Christmas, the new knife nut and Barney bonded with him just like he did Tool. Here you thought you'd be next in line, next oldest member, second in command. Things just don't work out that way, do they?

Pop a couple Excedrin, swill a couple of beers around in your mouth, repeat.

You're sitting here at this nameless bar down on the outskirts of town, it's sort of like a diner except you can get Sam Adams to go along with your greasy eggs and fried toast. How long has it been since the last job? A couple weeks? Your tee shirt is sour and clinging to your back, if you looked under it you'd see that your armpits are dyed yellow by your own sweat. Your shoelaces are glued forever with dirt, if you even tried to untie them they'd fall apart at this point. You stopped hopelessly flirting with the lady behind the counter minutes ago, she sees you for what you are.

You're sweaty and wired up, your hair is greasy and your fingernails are caked with dirt. A less than fine yellowy powder is dumped on the side of one of your huge fingers by expert hands, steady, steady... sniff. Did a little bit get on the floor? You're on your hands and knees in the bathroom, nose on the cold tile, lights flickering above you. You could have sworn you saw a rock there on the floor, you're picking, looking. Three times now you've stuck a bit of rolled up deodorant in your pipe and smoked it, a couple more times it's been a pebble. Crack, meth, you don't discriminate any more. Both are drugs for the dirty lowlifes who crawl around on bathroom floors looking for more rock. There's gotta be something, so many people frequent this place, it's no stretch of the imagination that some of them have had rock, dropped it, forgotten it.

Your hands seize on something, a little piece of yellowish material. You put the miniscule bit in your pipe, light it with a lighter you stole from Barney... it's a chip. Fuck! There'll be something, don't worry, there'll be something. Keep looking, the odds are in your favor, Gunnar, just keep looking around. There are so many rock heads, speed freaks around here, so many people itching at their skin and sifting in dirty corners, you know you'll find something. Your ass is in the air, your knees are planted on the hard tile, you've been looking at that one place so long that there are lines on the bottom of your palms matching those of the grout between the tiles. Your face looks accusing at you stare at the same spot, your muscles tense and twitching in places. Your biceps have been flexed for over forty minutes as you've held this position.

Was that something? A blistering gleam of hope hits you square in the face. No, it was only a chip of white in the dirty dingy tile.

You're leaning up against the bathroom wall now, the high in recent memory. The Excedrin you've been chewing, it's painted your lips an off shade of white. The beer you've been drinking, it's spilled down your shirt like old yeasty piss. By the time you stumble out of the miniscule bathroom on the side of the diner, it's eight o'clock at night.

Stumbling down the road, drunk, coming down hard off of a high, you don't remember shit, and that's okay.

Yank the last sip of beer out of your pocket and drink it with another Excedrin. Throw the bottle across the road and watch as it shatters into a million sparkling pieces.

If you're not half retarded with holes in your stomach by now, you haven't been paying attention. Do not pass go, do not collect 200$.

The burning desire to see Barney, to go talk with him, it's so fucking great. You're a goddamned giant and he's so little, so unacceptably small. You're sort of laughing at it, sort of having a chuckle over the fact that Barney sometimes wears uppers in his shoes and you all know. It's like an episode of that shitty show Seinfeld where the midget wears uppers and all the other midgets get mad at him. You smile a wide toothy grin at that, so wide that it cracks one of your dry lips painfully. Holding a finger to your face, you forget where you were going. Where are you again?

That shitty blistering confusion is setting in bone deep.

It was a time for you of constant change, a carefree time, well, if you count constantly looking for something to snort as carefree. Meth, smoking it sort of fucks you up, you snorted it. Crack you smoked because, well, cocaine isn't exactly cheap, even with your huge salary there was not room for a cocaine addiction. Thing about cocaine is, when you're doing it, all you want is more cocaine. Crack is better, a downer with that lazy feel to it, you feel like a shaky leaf on the edge of a tree ready to fall off in Autumn. Heroin... truth is you never really did heroin not that much. It wasn't your thing. Strangers? If they need to know, you tell them it was heroin. Sounds better than crack, sounds better than crank. It doesn't stop you from having a perverse interest in krokadil. You think that if it were the only option, assuming you had one, you could get used to the dead on your feet high heroin provided.

Course, you don't have an option, do you?

Anhedonia, that's when after being strung out on whatever long enough, you can't have fun doing anything else. The world doesn't have color, nothing fun is fun anymore, there's just the drug and then there's every thing else, the real world turns into a bad coloring book. Sex is just some woman grinding your dick inside your meat flaps, missions are just you squeezing the trigger of your gun. Crank addicts get it because of the lack of dopamine the brain is getting. Knowing that doesn't make it any better. This memory, displaced and foggy, it feels better than anything has for eight months, give or take a few weeks. It feels more real, more vibrant. It feels better than the frosty edges of this glass at Tool's shop. People might say it's similar to depression, but the way you see it, is that at least with depression they can chock you full of shit and send you home.

Think of life as a sick joke. What do you call a caseworker who hates her job and loses every client? Dead. What do you call the police worker zipping her into a big rubber bag? Dead. What do you call the television anchor on camera in the front yard? Dead. It does not matter. The meth addict who sometimes liked crack, Valium, whatever? Even if he doesn't use, he's DEAD. The joke is that we all have same punchline. The entire Earth desperately tries to escape the inevitable because we think we're so refined, having choices.

Barney's going over some battle thing, where you're all going to take down yet another pirate ship. Somalia, it has to get its ass in fucking gear because that place is blowing up with pirates. This is the second ship you've ever done, second ship where all the people have been there for three months. You're thinking about how hard it must be to sit in the dank dark and piss in a corner, just waiting to die. It dawns on you that with literally nothing to lose, those people are in a better position than you are now. Everyone's pressuring you not to fall, asking you not to fall, trying to make sure you're not stumbling on the side of the road with a brain full of fuck and a mouth full of white Excedrin goop. Instead of feeling like a bright spot, you feel only embarrassment at that memory. It's funny how things can change in a matter of twenty, thirty seconds. You wonder if Barney's remembered the krokadil, if you'll ever be back in Russia again.

There's a new apocalypse in every corner of the world.

Barney Ross, a name sometimes adorned with the word big before it. You wonder what he sees when he looks into the mirror. It can't be what you see, a short little man with huge veins and a face that only a mother could love. Truth is, you think that Barney might be into this gun-for-hire thing just as an ego boost, just to make him feel better about himself for a few hours. Barney, really pleading and trying with everyone, please oh please don't mention my plastic surgery, don't mention the uppers in my boots, don't mention how short I am or how I'm probably far too old to be doing things like that. He doesn't say it but you see it in his eyes, that's good enough.

Weird thing about eyes though, is that have that reflective quality.

Barney, he's making plans, pointing to bits of paper with boats on them with a pen, doing this and that. He's been talking for almost one hundred and seventy four minutes.

Yin has his phone out under the table, hidden with an ankle resting on a knee. If you didn't know that, you'd say he was deep in thought.

Toll Road has his glasses on and is looking, nodding periodically. He's also wringing his hands, he's nervous, he's anxious. Toll's always been a basket of nerves before missions.

Hale is squinting at something across the room with mild interest. It's either one of the signs on the walls or maybe he's just counting bricks at this point.

You're glazed over, but at least your head is pointed at the maps, the diagram of the ship, whatever.

Christmas, Lee Fucking Christmas that little cooze, he's right up Barney's ass, giving input, pointing.

Go back to fucking Britain and take your greasy fish n' chips finger with you. Little fucker, little interloper. You were next in line, goddammit, and that's the god's honest truth.

"What's a horny pirate's worst nightmare?" you ask, grin in transit.

Everyone looks at you with faces that say 'not again'.

"A treasure chest with no booty!" you fake laugh and slap your knee. You can hear Toll groaning internally from here. Yin, the English language challenged bastard, he doesn't even understand the joke. Barney's glaring at you.

Negative attention is better than no attention at all.

Christmas throws everything back on track.

It's easy to dwell on the past when the future is so uncertain. Fate, human control, whatever, you still don't know what's gonna happen. It's easy to call up memories, live through them good or bad. Truth is, people don't want to be helped with their problems, their dramas, their shortcomings. What would they have left to dwell in? What concrete aspect would their be left to cling to? You don't know the weather tomorrow for sure, but you do know that you're gonna wake up and immediately wish you were high. That's a rope in a sea of mist and monsters and fuckery. That's something to cling to, a life preserver, something to keep you from being completely amiss.

Barney's still droning on and on, you swear, in a past life this guy was a college professor. Same air of superiority, same hatred of interruption, same feeling that everything he's saying is important. He's going to go through this plan, no one but he and Cooze-Christmas are going to retain anything, then you're all going to go in there and do the job perfectly. Same shit that always fucking happens.

Truth is, sometimes it doesn't happen. The sinking feeling in your gut isn't something you can hide from. You're reminded of the pink balloon atop your trash. Probably latex. People with spina bifida, they're almost always allergic to latex for some reason. Need those special condoms.

Gameshows, they only exist to make you proud of knowing random shit, make you use the crap clunking around in your brain.

Human ribs have been completely replaced by means of the cell cycle in 15.1 years. You're a chemist, or, you were gonna be. Not a biologist. There's no reason for you to know any of that shit, yet there it is rearing its ugly head.

You've barely used any bits of your education since getting out of school. The phosphorus incident at the mine, well, that still is fresh in your head. The embarrassment.

Maggie saying "Don't cry."

Eugh, Asian bitches... they're not so good in bed. A whole lot of them just sort of lay there like dead fish. Ever fucked a warm canned ham? Same thing, except the ham doesn't nag you after and you don't have to wear a condom.

Truth is, Gunnar, you lie to yourself constantly. Are you a junkie or a speed freak? Did you want to fuck Maggie or didn't you? Are you tired of the same old repetitive bullshit or are you scared of what isn't constant?

Are you saying all this shit to sound like a pretentious dick or are you genuinely a fickle piece of shit?

What about Barney?

Enough, enough, enough! you scream in your head.

Only Yin sees you turn slightly red out of the corner of his slanted eye.

You've always been a crazy motherfucker.


	10. Chapter 10

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

The boat's engine is the only sound in the night except for the water. It looks black like oil, slick and sticky. The ocean can get polluted, it can be grosser in some parts than it is in others, you know that. In New Orleans, all the shrimp are dying because of the Nitrates flowing in from the Mississippi. You've never cared for shrimp. Hale's clutching his gun so tight his knuckles are gray, you can see him flexing each pectoral tentatively from the other side of the boat. Everyone else is just as much on edge. Now is the time when you're going to wish that you paid attention to Barney's drawling voice, now's the time when your going to regret staring off into space. You slip your hand into your pocket and feel the silver flask there, the pills of Excedrin taped to the side.

It used to be that you'd have a cyanide pill in the pocket of your pants for missions. Now you think it's cowardly. Suicide should never be an option when getting murdered and making someone's day is. Fuck, you sound really grim today.

The nose of the boat is in the air, that's how fast you're going. The moon, well, suffice to say there is no fucking moon tonight. It's like you've been stuck in BP's oil leak. You're all birds with oil in their feathers, unable to take flight. There's something poetic in there you're sure. Maybe if you were more of a lateral thinker, you could publish a shitty book of poems. Maybe if you were more of a vertical thinker, you'd be teaching chemistry at some school.

That show Breaking Bad? You look up more to Walter White than you do anyone else. Well, that's actually a lie because you've only seen a few episodes, still, you think he's a pretty cool fucking guy though. 'Course, you don't get high on your own supply, Walter knows that. You doubt you would be able to make meth without dying from overuse of your own product. The fact that he colors it blue was something that you always found funny. In kid's cartoons and stuff, ice and water is blue. Most meth is yellowy white and it's called ice. You found the connection to be ever so slightly amusing. It's not one a lot of people would make immediately. Funny thing is, you know of crank addicts who are really into the show. Maybe it's because they crave the control Walter has, the power over the addicts he has, the money he has. Maybe they want to pretend that they could be anything like him one day. Being an addict, you know you're powerless. It's one of the worst parts and one of the best parts at the same time.

The boat is like a giant turd on the horizon, the only way you can tell its there is because there's a space where the stars stop. Your eyes aren't really that good anymore, maybe in years past you could have made out the pirate graffiti on the sides. This time, this time you're not paying anyone anything. You're killing all the pirates and then leaving the hostages to be picked up by the local government. That's the plan, anyways, that's the plan. The thing about it, is no matter how much Barney likes to fiddle with graphs and diagrams and whatever, something will always get fucked up.

Truth is, last time you did a pirate mission you were that something. You can't say that it wasn't satisfying as fuck to see that black body get ripped off its legs, smacking against the steel wall. Funny thing is, some of the hostages had peed themselves. Civilians are a little bit pathetic sometimes. You always notice how people shit and piss themselves before they die, once you learned about it in school you always kept and eye out. The day Christmas dies is the day that you take a picture with Yin's phone and put it on the internet. See the Brit create the legendary death shit hammock. Except the truth is that you probably won't do that. You like to pretend you're tougher and edgier than you are sometimes. Sometimes? Try all the time.

The boat's hit the side of the bigger boat and Yin's scampering up a rope he threw up with a grappling hook. He's climbing up the rope without even using his feet, little chink monkey that he is.

Gunnar? This is the beginning of the end. Your end.

Stop, I need to concentrate, you're thinking forcefully. Gun on your back you're moving up the rope followin-

Stop! You think again, your face turning red with the effort. Oh Gunnar, oh poor sweet Gunnar, have you finally come unhinged? Something about pirate ships does it, isn't that right? That's right, mutter under your breath more, Hale's making faces behind you, making eye contact with Toll road. You're thinking now, is this drug induced psychosis? Truth is, Gunnar, I've been here for a long time. I've been here longer than you, longer than you could ever know. I can smell your brain Gunnar, I can see into your soul. Watch, I can do just about anything. I know about Barney, Gunnar, I've been watching you watch him, listening to you think about him for a long time now, such a long time. You're hating how badly he's aged, I know it, I really do, Gunnar. Poor sweet giant Gunnar, Frankenstein's Swedish Beast. Your accent sounds like you're talking through poorly sea-

Your eyes snap open and you're breathing hard. It was just a dream, a foul dream that's made bile rise from your stomach and into your mouth. You take a Tums, chewing it and spreading it around your mouth with your tongue for good measure. It helps take away the taste and your stomach settles. Your sitting on the edge of your bed, hands planted on either side of your hip. The room is clean, everything with a layer of dust over it because you're rarely here anymore. Sometimes when you're in your own home you end up just sleeping on the couch anyways, or on the recliner if your back is acting funky. Last night you felt better than you looked, that's for damn sure. The krokadil hut, the thing was a bust. Gunnar fucked it up, accidentally, but hell. He hasn't been using, not that you've seen, there's no sweaty slickness about him, no real psycho intentions, nothing big.

He's been alright to Yang, normal to everyone else, same annoying guy he's always been for the most part. You've known Gunnar for a lot of years and things just... unhinge sometimes. He's never been a very stable guy, never really been completely normal. Your breath hitches in your chest a little when you sit up, your joints unsticking themselves and moving you across the room. He's been mumbling under his breath a lot lately, nothing really new. It was something he did when he was using glass, you're not too sure what it's indicative of, but you also don't really want to breach the subject too deeply. Gunnar's a private guy, believe it or not.

You're sitting on the toilet taking a shit when your phone rings. Little busted up motorola razor. Gunnar's name is on the front screen, and you pick it up slowly, trying to sigh it all out before your mouth gets to the mouthpiece.

"Gunnar." your voice sounds more tired and haggard than you expected it to. Before you've even gotten the last breath of the second syllable out, his deep voice is already reverberating out of the phone. You yank the earpiece away from your head a little in surprise.

"Why am I half dead in my apartment?" he's asking, incredulous. You run a hand through your hair.

"Where else were we gonna put you?" Answering a question with a question has always worked well with Gunnar. He doesn't like to be told things, not straight up anyways. Gunnar's a little sensitive to being proven wrong or talked down to, you've learned that about him if you've learned anything through the years.

"Are we paid?" he asks, his voice more quiet now. Goddamn, he doesn't remember fucking up, or he doesn't know. When you all found him, he was in pretty bad shape. He lost a lot of blood, his face was all white. Really, you've always been surprised at his ability to heal, because if it had been you sitting there on the floor bleeding out, you wouldn't have the blood pressure required to stand up. Age has nothing to do with it, or so you think.

"We don't get paid for failing missions." Your wiping your eyes, half to get the crust out of them and the other half just to release some stress. You could sure use a cigar right now.

"What?" he asks in a way that makes the word itself seem flat. You explain what when wrong with the mission, or more accurately, what didn't go right. You can hear him bitching internally from here. He's taking it offensively, like you're saying it's all his fault. Really though, you're both not saying it and saying it all the same time. If Gunnar wasn't there, the mission probably wouldn't have gotten fucked up. It is his fault above all, at the same time it wasn't the most perfect of conditions. He hangs up on you, slamming the mouthpiece of his phone down before the earpiece so you hear the bang.

"Real mature, Gunnar." you say, wiping your ass.

The hot water of the shower relaxes some of the tension out of your body, letting you move easier. The steam gets you out of breath a little for some reason. You brush your teeth, avoiding looking into the mirror as you do so. You're going to the garage to tend to the truck that Gunnar fucked up. You're just a little bit bitter about the state of it, bulletproof glass isn't so inexpensive. It served its job, you and Yin aren't hamburger with teeth, but it sucked that it had to. Especially for the likes of Gunnar. Fuck, that entire Vilena mission was the worst. The Russian Plutonium mission was at least somewhat amusing. That Maggie girl, for all her flirting, well, she never tried to contact you after the mission. You're guessing that Church told her to try to hop on your dick to see if it was possible to control you with young pussy.

Yeah, that does sound just a little bit jaded, but what can you say? You walk out of the bathroom with a towel around your waist and light up a cigar, puffing on it as you sit on the couch and click on the television. Some boring CNN shit about politics. Long ago you abandoned all hope of the American government ruling itself effectively, now you just hope you'll be senile or dead before everything finally reaches the final state of cataclysm. You really should be getting off your ass and getting down to that garage, but hell, you're sore and bruised and feel like shit. If you had walked over to a hospital and had claimed to have been mugged, well, they probably would have made you stay overnight for observation, and that's the truth.

You rarely let yourself relax anymore, there's just the dense feeling of having so much going on even though you know that's not the case. You're melting into your couch, listening to the less than lulling voices of the news anchors hash out whatever's going on in this sick, broken world.


	11. Chapter 11

You storm onto that boat like you're storming into battle. Think the Vietnam front, think D-Day. You're three or four years too young for Vietnam but you think maybe Barney and Trench were there. Steel toed boots are clattering on the metal floors, echoing, echoing. Barney's doing his dumb hand signals again. Listening. Pushing you all up behind him against a wall. The ship's dead quiet except Caesar's breath is in your ear. You want to jab him with your elbow. Leap away from the crammed together group. Maybe this is how Rat Kings happen. The group gets so close for so long that suddenly they're tangled. It's funny, most of them are found in Germany. Them being the rat kings, not the group of men you're with.

No. You're in Somalia again because even though everyone has enough money to live for a while, it'll never be enough.

Here you are, going at the speed of life. You'll never be as young as you are tonight.

The ship is dark and quiet. The inside of the whale Moses was in, the inside of the cold barrel of an antique gun. You're all trying to crouch, to be quiet, but after four minutes of keeping your torso parallel to the ground you're back has bad about enough. You're standing straight. Sneaky sneaky you go over to Barney. You all formed a line of scrimmage, a line to sweep the ship back and forth, up and down. Only problem is that no ones here. None of the ship's mechanisms are even on or moving. Lots of big boats, they seem like they're alive. So many moving parts, so many hisses of gas and all that shit. This seems like a corpse, something dead and gazing at the sky. A beached whale left to rot out on the beach. The smell of the salty water gets everywhere till your skin smells of it.

There's no one here. you say, bending your knees to get right near Barney's left ear. There's little creases in the skin in front of where the ear starts. Perfect place for dead skin to collect.

"You don't know that." he's shooting back. You roll your eyes until just the whites are showing under a sliver of blue. The entire ship is dead quiet except for all of you. You become brutally aware of your breathing and try to do it quieter. Two levels of this later you're all on deck waiting to be ambushed by some hiding pirates. There's nothing on the ship, no merchandise, no nothing. To you it almost looks old and out of place in these cargo carrying waters, a ship at least 15 years old. Something seems deadly wrong and by the way Barney trots off to discuss something with Lee and Yin, well, that just seals the deal.

You're impatient. Something isn't right and if Barney would pull his head out of his ass he would see that. The codger is finally cracking, finally not seeing that something is dead fucking wrong here.

Or he knows something you don't.

It's not betrayal if there's not trust built up first. You're drinking from the tiny flask that you remembered to bring this time. You had a fucking feeling you'd need it.

When they come out of the alcove again, you ask where the job came from. You almost know the answer before Barney's slow moving mouth forms the word.

"Church."

Toll Road lifts off his bucket hat and rubs his forehead. He makes eye contact with Hale. They know it's a fucking set up.

"We were set up." Lee Christmas mutters in a way that makes you want to shout 'Duh!'. So you do.

The single syllable is echoing off the sides of the ship into nonexistence when there's a faint beeping noise heard, one that's unmistakeable. There's more then one, now, all rising into a cacophony of beeps. Before you know it, you've jumped off the side of the boat into the ocean. The ocean that looks like black tar, like ink, like the pupils of Caesar's eyes. Boom. Shrapnel, pieces of boat, they're fucking everywhere. Flying at speeds, whizzing over your heads. The boat collapses in on itself, a pie with bad filling, a table made with weak bowing wood. There's nothing but ringing in your ears now and fuzzy shapes in front of your eyes. The blast was on the deck but still you can feel the unmistakable sensation of having the hair on the back of your neck burnt off for the umpteenth time in one night. The dingy you took here, where is it? There's no explaining anything, your mind is racing, you don't know if the water coming off of you is sweat or just water or blood. You see Barney's screaming face in the distance but no one Else's. Soon enough, treading water, a feat which is very hard in boots, you're turning around and you see the others behind you.

Toll Road's left eye is all filled with blood, the cornea is red and weepy, not pink eye red; tomato sauce red. Yin's frantic, his slanted eyes so wide that they almost look normal. You feel weighed down in the kevlar, and soon everyone's together in a semicircle, treading, treading. No one knows you're all out here, no one knows and you could all slowly die in this circle. You think of the Donner Party, you think of that shitty movie Open Water. Goddamn.

"Church set us up!" Is that spit flying from your mouth, or water? Calm down, take a breath. You're breathing hard, peeling the black knit hat off your head. It floats in the water for a little bit then sinks because it gets saturated. Human skin, cells, well, in salt water they shrivel up and take all the water they had to begin with and push it right the fuck out. That's why drinking salt water kills you. That's why just being in salt water makes you thirsty.

"We knew too much." Lee mutters again, looking down into the water. You casually start peeing. Don't act like everyone hasn't done it before. Of course coming from Lee it sounds rational, if it comes from you it sounds like the ramblings of some crazy motherfucker.

Entry wounds, they're not the thing that kills you. The bullet tearing through the flesh of whatever it hits, nope, that's not what kills you either. All that and you'd be fine. It's when the bullet slows down and takes chunks with it on the way out. If it went fast all the way through, well, that wouldn't be a problem. Sure, you'd bleed a lot, but not a whole ton. No, what really fucking kills you is the exit wound. The bullet's slow destructiveness is what finally tears you up, what kills ya. 'Course we're talking about fleshwounds here, not the head, the brain, the heart, whatever. You think of that TV special you saw one time, where the guy lived after having a drill bit go through his eye and out the back of his head. You remember Toll talking about some shit who lived in the 1860's who got a tamping iron through the bottom of his head and out his eye. Phineas or Phillias or something his name was. Either way, you think of all that and you're suddenly checking for snipers on the debris. It's not rational, no, but hell, no one thinks you are so you shouldn't try to live above their expectations even in your own head.

"Barney, when's the last time you heard from Trench?" Toll Road asks, his voice sounds like he tested cigarettes for the Newport company. When he was seven. Barney wipes his eyes, looking distraught, or at least you think that's him being distraught.

"Before the last mission, the krokadil one."

Everyone exchanges looks like you're all in a fucking sitcom or something. Is this guy serious? There's an air of disbelief in all of you. The sky is black, the water is black, your clothes are black. Truth is, you might fucking die here. Best case scenario someone comes back and bombs the debris of the ship and yourselves from the air. Worst case scenario is that someone recovers 6 bodies from the bottom of the ocean, one of them extensively eaten. The brain is 75% water. Think of all that cerebral fluid. You're regretting having peed, whether there was that pleasant warm spot there or not.

The sound of blades cutting the air, that's what you hear next after there's a dull silence for what feels what hours and could have been hours but you didn't see the sky brighten up none so it probably wasn't. Coast Guard? No, thank fucking god.

Local authorities. Black faces in uniforms. You can deal with those, can get them to bring you ashore and get your asses on the plane and back the fuck home. You can't deal with the United States coastguard, who'll be inquisitive, who'll fuck things up real quick when they start asking questions about the guns and the kevlar vests. Thing about being a Mercenary is, you're really not on the right side of the law very often.

They're sending ropes down from the couple of choppers. You really want a toke right about now. Can't even do that, it's a wonder you can still drink. Your toke bone? It's attached to your crank bone which is attached to your crack bone. They're all the same, cause and effect.


	12. Chapter 12

People say we have a choice when we do the things we do. People say that you choose whether you want to be a doctor or a homeless person or an Evangelical preacher. Really though we're just pushed to a precipice all through our lives and when we finally look around us and want to change, want to become something else, we can't. There's nothing left but putting one day in front of another until finally your heart gives out or you have a stroke or you get hit by a bus. Of course there are endless amounts of ways to commit suicide without actually dying and you know that more than anyone else. So it goes.

Barney's been withdrawn and leaning over the computer where Yin taps away furiously, trying to find out just who the hell Church is. If anything the man's covered his tracks well. There's the nagging feeling in your gut, wanting more of the tequila you've been drinking plain. You're all at Tool's and you're sitting on your bike. Toll's eye is better, everyone looks worse for the wear though. At first when you all got back Barney wanted results and stayed up night after night to get them, to try and find Church, to try and see if he could locate Trench. You know because you stood on the other side of the street and drank from a plastic bottle of vodka that tasted more like some sort of corrosive acid than something you were supposed to drink to have a good time. Now though, Barney's mostly just sitting back and watching Yin do the same 5 searches over and over. Going through the motions. The glasses on his face make him look sort of stupid, their ridgid straightness making the lopsidedness of his face even more apparent.

Everyone's been mostly quiet too. A lot of the time after a mission goes sour for whatever reason (you) everyone sort of splits up until Barney brings more work to the table. Instead now there's nothing much else but sitting around here to do. Christmas has been fucking Lacy like mad though, you're pretty sure, you can smell it on him. That woman scent of clean sheets and pussy.

Trench though. You think he was set up by Church, led off somewhere into a shitty jungle and killed in one of his ugly button down shirts. Truth is, you can only save somebody so many times until you can't. As far as you're concerned, Trench is old news and the only thing that's gonna come from saving him is more competition.

You're looking down at your shoes, the brown heavy leather boots on your feet. Laces that used to be white are brittle and brown, starched with dirt and muck and lord knows what else. You've never put too much effort into your appearance. Getting into the shower is only good until you have to get back out again.

Get up, pace around, listen to how your footfalls are echoing in the high ceilinged garage. As if on queue, as soon as you get up, Barney stands straight and removes the ugly frames from his face.

"Yin's going to go sniff around Southeast Asia, see if Trench is there."

There's a point in your life where you suddenly realized that everything you do, everything you think, say, it's not going to make a difference. You're going to turn into this dead thing in the earth or burned into smoke, flying into the atmosphere and polluting the rain. It's gonna happen and the only thing that'll change is how you get there. That won't even matter though, thirty years down the road when all that's left of you is a caricature.

It was twelve years ago when you got that ugly question mark shaped scar on your face. It hasn't done anything for your appearance, hasn't done anything to make you look better. If anything it's intimidating to the potential fucks, it makes them think maybe you're dangerous, some kind of gangster. Sometimes if they're open minded enough they'll just assume it's a wound from some sort of war, some sort of accident. A mix of all three isn't quite it either, but it's close.

The thing about working in warm, wet areas, is how you watch your body fall apart after a while. Your fingerprints become mushy, indistinct, white as the skin peels back and grinds off. Your hair, the follicles get so dense with sweat and rain and humidity from the air, falls out right at the base. It doesn't matter if you're 15 years old or 50, if you're thrown into that environment, you're going to feel the pain in your joints as the wet air creeps into your bones and makes a nest there. The bugs are bad, but the weather is so much worse.

Stopping that prostitution ring, stopping the human traffickers, it should have been so easy, is the thing. No one counted on laying in some ditch for 18 hours, no one counted on things being so damn hard. Tool, the optimist, the one who always had something good to say, effective, well, he had nothing. All the rain getting in your ears so everything was muted, the sky clouded with rainclouds so not even a moon could show through. Wet hands trying to mop water off an equally wet face.

Going in wasn't the worst part about it. You had been waiting, watching, for so damn long that by the time you got up you could hear the faint sound of you unsucking your ass from the mud. That little splurgy pop. You took a step and you went in the mud to your knee, then to your other knee. Yanking your leg out each time, the suction working against you, it was tough. It was tougher for Yin, who had just joined, a fresh face. Seeing him struggle through the mud like that, so short and clumsy- out of his element- it made you have second thoughts. The shanty you were going towards with its dark wood and red lit outside, it was larger than it had seemed from 20 meters away.

Next thing you know teargas and red smoke bombs are being thrown around, you're staggering with your forearm pasted over your eyes. You'd suppose that the moisture in the air would make the spread of the gasses slow a bit, but that's not the case, at least that you can tell. One of your elbows goes through a window in your blind movements, you're spraying bullets with your gun, unaware of who they might be hitting. You're dimly in tune to the fact that you're screaming deep and loud, like some sort of wounded herd animal. For some reason your own voice seems distant and beyond your control. You eyes are stinging but that doesn't stay the worst of your problems for long. There's the hearty click of your starved gun, your empty gun. Blindly, wiping wildly at your red and irritated eyes, you look for the banana clip to place in the automatic weapon that's now unable to do its job.

You might have had your hands on something that seemed enough like the object you were searching for, but before you could pull it towards you, pain that both cut and seared split open your pec. Behind your watering eyes, through the redish yellow smoke, you see a man wearing a gas mask with a heated knife in his hands. It's not long before you have to shut your eyes again. Swinging around your knife blindly doesn't help much, you don't make contact with anything. One searing burn on your pinky finger later, you're lunging forward, eyes just slits. The gas smells like the inside of a dumpster, gasoline and cheap apple cider.

You, the lumbering giant of the team, blinded and staggering and swinging a huge knife around like a neanderthal, you fall right on your fucking face. That's when it happens, that's when you it the blade of the dead man's knife in such a perfect way as to carve a fish hook permanently into your face. You can feel the skin sort of flap down and instantly your hand flies up to push the flap back against your cheek. Shots in the distance, or rather, maybe closer than you think ring out, you struggle to your feet and try to open your eyes, try to find a way out...

"Gunnar? Yoo hoo!" Barney's vaguely waving a hand in your face. You blink and snap back to the here and now.

"Yeah? What?" You ask, scratching the stubble on your chin. Hale is looking at you somewhat wearily, you see out of the corner of your eyes. Barney's eyebrows are raised more than usual, as if he's waiting for you to do something. You raise your eyebrows too.

"Yin's going to Asia to see if Trench is there. On the off chance that he is and he's in trouble, we're all going down. For now, everyone should keep a low profile." Barney's saying quickly, because apparently he's already explained all that.

"Got it." you say and swill the rest of your tequila around your mouth.

An hour later, where are you? You're in the liquor store, scratching off a ticket. The little filings that are coming off the piece of thick paper are being blown away from your heavy breath. Some kid's behind you, listening to something with a heavy beat. You're bent so low over the counter that your ass must be nearly touching him. The guy running the register knows better than to try and ask you to scratch the seven dollar ticket somewhere else. You look intimidating. As soon as it's all scratched you check to see if you got anything, holding the card up to your eyes and squinting a little.

"Shit." A loser, not surprising though. You throw the card so it spins and hits the cashier in the chest. He's saying something about how you forgot something or other, probably the gallon of milk you've left on the counter. No harm no foul, usually when you buy milk it goes bad anyways. Plus, going back and getting it would be embarrassing and the chance that the clerk is going to chase you down the street is pretty low. People just don't take their shit jobs as seriously as they used to and it shows.

You turn a corner, walking aimlessly through the semi-crowded streets, and you see something that almost knocks you on your ass.

Maggie. The Chinese lock breaker girl, the one who had the hots for Barney and not you. Yeah, that bitch. You're yanking your shitty flip phone out of your pocket, dialing Barney's number, not taking your eyes off of her. Thing is though, she's looking at you too. She wanted to be seen, wants to be seen. She probably has a pretty good idea of who you're calling too.

"Hello?" Barney says, clearing his throat.

"Maggie, the Chinese girl. In the street, starin' at me right now."

Barney knows this isn't a coincidence, you know this isn't a coincidence. He sighs into the phone, and you part your lips and offset your jaw a little, a tick from being cranked out that never fully left you.

"Where are you?"

"Right by the Seven Eleven." You say, still standing there. Your hand disappears into your pocket but it doesn't seem like it knows what it's looking for and all you produce from it is some lint which sticks under your fingernail.

Maggie disappears into the crowd, walking backwards and finally turning around. Barney's saying something, but it's not long before you've shut your phone dramatically and shoved it in the pocket of your worn out, soft jeans.

You're sprinting across the street now, taking giant steps to try and catch up. When you bump into more than a few disgruntled college kids, they scream insults and tell you to get the fuck out of their way, if they're polite. Maggie's at the horizon of your field of vision, wearing a gray coat and jeans despite the more than warm conditions that have been plaguing the city as of late.

Then, she's gone. Your phone is ringing in your pocket, the disjointed pinging music much louder than it needs to be.

Barney.

"I lost her." you say before he says anything. You can hear the curt nod, envision it.

"You think she was sent to tail you by Church?" The question is less of a question and more of a way to get the conversation rolling. Pedestrians are parting around you.

"Church thinks I'm the weakest link and is sending her after me. Are you sure he said we were all set after the Uranium thing?"

"Pretty fucking positive."

"We just know too much then, right?" You're trying to get on the same page as Barney. He doesn't think aloud or converse well, all those gears moving in his mind.


	13. Chapter 13

Next thing you know, you can't stop looking over your shoulder. It's been eight days since you last saw Maggie, eight days since you stripped down and got in the shower. That's the most vulnerable place, the shower. You can imagine yourself wet and naked, a face full of a spray of water, getting attacked by armed grunts in black. No fucking thank you. This isn't the punchline to some military propaganda joke, this isn't a hypothetical situation in some special op. This is you're life and even if it's a steaming tower of shit at the moment, you're still responsible for keeping it going. Any who, right now you're looking a little rough, a little rumpled. Your hair is on the verge of clumping together because of all the grease in it. You've gotten a few passing sniffs of yourself.

The bar you're at right now isn't the sort that would kick out a guy like you on a Thursday night for being unhygienic. It's the sort where people get in fights and lay plastered to the floor, unconscious, in shock, sleeping, dead, for hours at a time before some loved one finds them and scrapes them off and brings them back home. It's the sort of place where the lights are so dim that you have to make a conceited effort to see what you're drinking and you can never be sure how clean your glass is. This is the sort of establishment that the police won't start bothering with until there's a triple homicide or something, something crazy, something way out there. Not even a Cop would like to slum around here in plain clothes. Your beer is piss warm as it travels down your throat.

"Another?" Croaks the bartender, over dyed hair like straw, probably a stripper or a hooker when she's not working at the bar. The blue eyeshadow does little to make her look less dried out.

"Yeah." You say smoothly. You're not sure what you're drinking anymore, as far as the brand goes. Usually you go for whatever's on tap, whatever's cheapest. Other times you treat yourself to the likes of a Hieneken or a Red Stripe. Drinking from the bottle always has a nice sort of feeling to it, you think. Just like beer tastes different when it's from the can.

Twenty minutes later you're wiping your mouth on the end of your shirt, the little rolls of fat that is your stomach curling up, making you look like some sort of worm as you bend down. This makes you laugh heartily and the increased amount of clientele who have graced this place in the last third of an hour look at you strangely. You're belligerent when you're drunk, it's true, but right now you have more things on your mind.

The thing about pissing on sidewalks, is that if a cop catches you, they can nab you for indecent exposure. This immediately makes you some kind of sex offender, some kind of guy who can't get a job working 200 ft. from a school. The important thing is to never, NEVER piss outside a bar. Instead you wander into an alley where a man is sleeping by a bunch of bags, old army jacket pulled around him. You piss in the trash, the most obvious place. You sort of wonder if the homeless man is dead until he moves. Then again, there are plenty of ways of being dead and still capable of movement. Just ask Barney's mother. Ha-ha.

Walking back home in uneventful. Something that's basically just a minor challenge. You're not sure of certain hurled insults are for you or not and quite frankly you're not in the proper mindset to reply to them anyways. If some kid got in front of you, got in your face, you would probably just stand there and breathe your yeasty beer breath on them. It's not the kind of drunk where you're stumbling about not knowing which way is up. Truth is, that's more likely when you breathe Ether from an old kleenex or something. No, this is the kind of drunk where the light's on but nobody's home. There's really nothing going on upstairs right now for you, just one foot in front of the other, finding your way back to your shitty apartment.

After crossing a street and almost causing an eight car pile up, that's exactly where you are. You smile to yourself as you wrangle with your keys, large fingers stumbling over tiny bits of metal. Finally it's there, you have it. Okay, Gunnar, get it in the lock. Push the key into the lock. Missed. Missed again. Goddamnit, it's upside down, flip it and try- Missed. Suddenly you try the knob. When you touch it a little, the door swings open. The doors already unlocked, the door's already open.

This sobers you some. The door creaks as you walk in, footfalls on the hardwood floors. There's still the regular stink of garbage collecting in the bin and food crusting onto plates. There's something else though, an oily copper smell that you'd know anywhere. Someone is bleeding in your apartment. Immediately you check your stomach... it's not you who's bleeding. You offset your jaw a little and check your couch. Nothing there.

For another fifteen minutes you're walking around your apartment, checking ridiculous places like behind your fridge for this blood. It's not until you get into your bathroom that you see just how right you were about it being the most dangerous place. What you see in there makes you want to hurl a little, and you do. You swallow it though, the yeasty acidic liquid that rises from your gut. You swallow it and then you go into your kitchen and turn the sprayer on your sink onto yourself. Cold water jets into your face, bringing you back to reality a little more. You go and check the bathroom again, standing there, filling up the doorway. Dumbfounded isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

You flip open your phone. You hit the first number that's in your recent calls.

"Yeah?" says Barney.

"Maggie's dead in my bathtub." you say, aware of how completely shitfaced you sound.

"You kill 'er?" he asks, a little buzzed himself. You're not the only one that's been coping with alcohol lately.

"No, I came home and she was dead here." You reply, trying to construct a sentence that makes you sound like you have at least something knocking around in your headspace. You're sitting down outside your bathroom now, crosslegged.

"You being sarcastic?" Barney asks after consulting someone who's with him; you couldn't hear well enough to put a name to the voice.

"No." Your voice even sounds gravelly and reverberating to yourself. You get up, your ankle pops a little, you lean over and look into the bathroom. Into the bathtub.

She's there, mouth open in a silent scream with a couple of flies buzzing around her head. Wearing plainclothes, one heel of a boot broken off. Blood everywhere, a knife wound in her throat from what you can see. You can't figure if she came here to warn you and got offed by her own people or if she was killed and then brought here. As unlikely as the second sounds, well, usually neck wounds make some kinda spray. There's none of that on the walls. Oh. Under the sink, the angle. You see it now and you see that your first instinct is probably the right one. You raise your eyebrows and walk away from the gracefully fermenting body.

You've downed a glass of water by the time they've arrived, they being both Barney and Hale. You jerk your thumb over your shoulder and set off toward your bathroom to show them the spectacle. Hale looks more than slightly disgusted at your living conditions. Maybe you've should have cleaned up a little.

"She's dead." Hale says, looking into the bathtub.

"Yeah, I know." you say, attempting to be dry and suave about the whole thing but coming off more as detached. Barney's scowling deep, deeper. He's scowling as much as his face with allow him to. Truth is, he really liked that girl even if he couldn't show it right. Truth is, no one deserves to be killed in the disgusting bathroom of a Swedish giant. You couldn't stop that though. So it goes.

A little while later you're helping Barney and Hale load the trash bag clad body into his truck in the night. Barney still hasn't said anything. Hale's been making random observations to fill up the silence.

"Body's a little stiff." he says with a grunt, lifting her into the bed of the ancient automobile.

"Yeah, I know." you reply for the umpteenth time. Barney looks concentrated from his place on the sidewalk. This really isn't the way you'd like to be spending your evening.

"What now?" You're asking the indisputable leader of The Expendables.

"I don't know." he says just loud enough to let you hear it. Hale is playing around with his razor blade. The name on it says Ceasar. Misspelled. You've always wanted to point it out to him, but you're pretty sure that he already knows.

"You guys going back to Tool's... after you deal with the body?" you ask, ripping a dirt encrusted hangnail off.

"We weren't at Tool's but we can go there if you want." says Hale diplomatically, looking at Barney for a nod before he says so. Next thing you know two large men and a sort of small one are crammed inside the cockpit of a sort of small truck.

"You think Church really has it out for us, huh?" You say, picking at your teeth with one of your fingers.

Barney nods, both hands firmly gripping the steering wheel at the 2 and 10 positions. Hale's mushed between you two, Barney has to reach between his kneecaps to get at the stick shift. You roll down your window, aware of the fact that you stink miserably. One run to an abandoned factory later and no one will know the body ever existed. It's a clump of ashes, going, going gone.

By the time you're at Tool's tattoo parlor, you're all cramped up from being in that car, rolling your shoulder and listening to your back crack as you walk to the door. The man himself, Tool? Well, he's sleeping upstairs where he lives, doing his thing. Barney's pouring himself something to drink, you almost ask for a shot of tequila but figure that you've probably had enough. This is an odd time for responsibility to suddenly kick in. It dawns on you that Barney's really the only one who can assert himself and come into Tool's place and just sort of do what he wants. You dimly wonder if Tool has a woman upstairs, some lady that he's had sex with who is now asleep near him. The only lady you've dealt with in the last eight days has been the dead one in the tub. Or your psychiatrist, if you want to get insulting about it. Not that you told that prick anything, your days of doing that are more than over.

The sun's rising now, a new day is starting. People are going to wake up (or not) and go about their lives making the human part of the world turn. They're going to make mistakes and die a lot of the time but in their place new screaming infants, the new watered down generation, they're gonna replace them and that's alright. That's how it works.

You look at the dartboard filled with knife gouges. So it goes. Somewhere to the side of you, Barney sighs.

Grief isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.


	14. Chapter 14

You wake up and some craggy looking kid with a mop is prodding you, saying something through his acne and braces. You have an overwhelming sort of need to punch the kid's coke bottle glasses off his face. You didn't know that stereotypes even existed in real life like this. You poke your lips out a little and try to tune into what the kid is talking about, squinting with the effort until your eyes close again...

"I said stop falling asleep at the fucking bar, man!" The kid says, the front of his shirt adorned with some ridiculous band logo. Here we fucking go. He jabbed you right in the ribs with his mop, so you twist the thing out of his hands and hurl it across the bar. The two other patrons present, old guys who have no kinda drive, they lazily watch the thing fly into some poster for a sports team that hasn't won jack shit in years. The kid's stammering now, but you just sort of walk out of the place, blinking in the midday sun.

You can't say how long it's been since you incinerated the body at that old steel factory, in fact, you can't really say you know what day of the week it is. There's a ringing in your ears and a thumping in your head that indicate that you've hungover as well as freshly drunk and by the way your fingertips pulse you know that you're probably a little dehydrated from eating nothing but chips and beer nuts. The sun is bright today, bright enough to be a complete bother, bright enough to make you want to climb to the highest building and try punching it in the face. You want to challenge Apollo to a bear knuckles brawl, you want to see how good he'll drive that chariot of his with a couple dislocated shoulders. You're not aware you were just standing there looking vaguely at the sky until someone coming out (into?) the bar thumps into you and mutters some kind of curse hinging on the fact that by this point, your clothes are pretty much rotting off your body. You haven't visited your apartment since that night, you cleaned up all that blood and left again. You suddenly wonder how every bad guy you guys deal with, how they get cleaned up. Do their kin come and deal with the body? How does that work?

No, don't think of that. That line of thinking might cause you to regard those people as something more than just bodies, that might make you a less effective killer. If there's something you need to keep in this world, it is your lack of hesitation to fire a weapon.

Speaking of weapon, Barney hasn't called you. Nobody's called you. Usually when you're gone this long they come and find you and drag you out of whatever bar you're in and clean you up a little. Guess times are a little bit busy for that. You hike up your pants and look for trouble in some other bar.

Thing is, even if you don't know how long its been since shit got real, you can say that you're pretty sure no one's heard hide nor hair of Yin Yang. You're pretty sure because Barney is quieter and quieter, this look plastered on his face that's a mixture of sad and focused. It's a look you don't especially like much because it's also a look of a man who's mind might just break from that sort of stress. You could recount a couple war stories about that sort of shit, about commanders and what not getting that look and offing themselves, shooting up their squad, going Colonel Kurtz on everyone's ass and turning into some kind of megalomaniac. That look, it burned you so much just in the first couple of times you saw it, you had to get out of there. Drowning yourself in drink is a hell of a lot better than sitting there and waiting for Barney to break down and do something insane. Yeah, the life gets to everyone every now and again, it's true. It got to you when you shat all over the Vilena mission. Now it's getting to Barney.

The day after, see, the day after you were all in Tool's while the man himself worked on Barney's back a little bit. You all had to meet up of course, you all had to get together and try to talk this out a little. Thing is though, between Lee texting that girl constantly, the little clicks and clacks of the buttons on his phone, between Toll Road acting like everyone was out to get him, Barney making that fucking face... no one said much of anything. When he explained it all to the people that weren't there to take part in that mess, well, they just sorta stayed quiet too. So it goes.

Have you ever heard a joke so many times you've forgotten why it's funny? The thing is, the entire human race, we all have the same punchline. We're all part of one huge joke that ends in death. At one point it could have been amusing but now it's just a part of the reality everyone wants to escape, the reality that everyone's hiding from. Because reality, that means you live until you die and no one wants that.

Now, you're all back in Barney's garage where he's finally got that fucking truck sort of in working order. You're looking out of the corner of your eye at Toll Road.

"And just what are you looking at?" he stands up. Everyone's on edge a little bit, maybe except for Christmas who's head is too far up his own ass to care about much. You see the semi-familiar white and blue of that facebook site everyone's on. His cellphone is more expensive than a lot of things you own.

You part your lips and offset your jaw a little, looking up and over at him. Barney nudges you a little with the hand that's holding the cigar. Seems like he's always smoking one these days, more than usual. More and more it seems like you're just doing some sort of bad impersonation of yourself. You fix your face and look over at Barney and you can tell he doesn't want to deal with the shit today. Toll Road, his angry avoidant issues, you know they come from some sense of worthlessness that goes more than skin deep. The thing is, how people are, it doesn't happen on accident. Every time he tells the story of how he fucked up another kid until he had clotted ears of his own, you feel a little worse for the poor guy. Maybe your self image isn't what it used to be, but there's more pride knocking around in the space between your ears than in Barney's or Toll Road's. That's something. That's enough to keep you above them.

"Nothing." you grunt. Caesar is eating something that looks like a grilled sandwich and smells like the inside of an Italian person's colon. Everyone's sitting in this semi circle, everyone's waiting for something to just fucking happen already.

"Yin's not back from poking around Asia yet. In fact, we haven't heard from him since before he left. But we already know all that." says Barney, his tone is dry and simple. There's not a lot going on there, it looks like. He's just saying things. Prop him up, put peanut butter in his mouth. Same effect, sort of.

"So are we gonna go look for him?" asks Caesar over his butt sandwich.

"Can't right now." Barney says sounding even more dejected. Hell, his face, his tone, it's hurting you more than the absence of the little midget ever would.

"And just why not?" asks Toll Road, standing again. His fists are clenched. For sure, everyone handles stress in their own sort of way. You hear the clacks of Lee's cellphone in your right ear.

"Do you know how much it costs to tramp around and entire continent looking for one man?" you inquire loudly, maybe a little bit too loud. After a tense bit of eye contact between you and Toll, he sits. Barney nods, agreeing with you. He's exasperated though, not very impressed with how you chose to get the word across. So it goes.

You don't notice Tool sitting and smoking on his pipe until he says something.

"There's a job in South America for you, transporting a box, same people as last time. 'Cept more pay, you guys got their trust."

"We'll use what we get with that to try and locate Yin if he's not in contact by then." says Barney, not even waiting for Tool's words to die completely to say it. You feel like even if you do find Yin, nothing will come of it. You're stuck in one of those dark ditches where everything seems futile and the pointlessness of it all makes you want to go to sleep in a puddle of liquor and never wake up again. This is the stuff relapses are made of.

Then there's the intense craving, so great it punches you right in the gut. Your entire face tingles with the want, you break out into a sweat. Only Tool seems to know just of what's happening to you, how much you would pay to get down and get something good in you. You scratch your face, as if the effect will bring forth the cause. Nope, nothing. Everything seems tunneled out, far away, you can hear some slight conversation but it all seems like the same shit anyway. A wave of nausea, a little shake of your hands. Heroin, it wouldn't have been as bad, you think. But meth? At least you got off it before it ruined your complexion, you're thinking. Then again, on a long enough timeline, everyone's complexion is ruined one way or another.

By the time you've snapped back it seems like everyone's making an effort to pretend that you weren't practically keeling over with the want of crank.

"We're leaving tomorrow at 0500 hours." says Barney in a way that makes you think he's repeating it again just for you. Your shirt is moist around the armpits so you take it off, sling it over your shoulder. Your pecs, they're still in pristine condition. The shitty weights in your apartment make sure of that, the hour a day you sometimes have to fight for does too. The gut though, not the flabby kind that hangs over the waistband of pants, the taught and stiff kind that just sort of... pokes out... that doesn't go away no matter how many push-ups you do. For a while there you thought it was just you getting a little older. Now you've started to wonder if your liver isn't swelling or changing to accommodate all the stuff you make it cycle out of your blood. The idea scares you a little. You suck in, look down, let it out.

When you get on your bike you watch it fold in half like a little butt stuck to your torso.

The next day, before the sun's even rose up yet, you're in the seaplane with Barney at the helm and Christmas stuck up his ass, like usual. Toll's reading War Games, Hale is looking at a picture of those kids. You've never seen 'em, you've never really heard him talk about them. You can't help wonder if they're dead or something. You're drinking even though it's the asscrack of dawn, just a little coffee and Bailey's. Usually a little too refined for your tastes, but hell, Caesar had the coffee and you had the Bailey's cream stashed somewhere on this metal lug. A time when you stayed in a compartment for hours is not too far in the past. You're no badass, you're a horrorshow. Ha-ha. Where the hell did you get that one?

Everyone's nice and quiet during the flight and nice and quiet when you get off too. This isn't a "black clothes and kevlar vest" kind of mission. You're dressed in a hideous patterned button down, everyone else is wearing what they usually wear. If you thought New Orleans was hot, this buggy shithole is so much worse. And humid too.

Step, step, look both ways, step step, look both ways. That's how the guarding thing goes and the carriers aren't on edge enough to bitch at you for tying your shoe, which you didn't notice until you damn near tripped on it. The thing about being tall, is that when you inevitably fall down at some point, you fall from so much higher up. You going down, that's the worst.

Seven miles you walk in that blistering heat, swigging from a water bottle that tastes more and more like the inside of your mouth. Barney might be scowling, but you can't really know. The emotional range of his face is very, very limited. When you get to the destination? There's a case of cash waiting and a van to drive you all back. Yes, a fucking van. It's such an easy job it wouldn't have been so hard to let Christmas drive the plane over to the destination while the rest of you left. At least he wouldn't be feeling for his phone's vibrations every couple of minutes. That aside, why the fuck do these idiots insist on carrying the case, the trunk, on foot? Damned if you know.

Flying back? That ain't so hard. This mission wasn't a victory, it wasn't even a mission. It was a fucking test of patience and that's all it was. By the time you get to Tool's you just sort of want a drink and to climb back into fucking bed. Going to sleep at the bar and annoy that kid doesn't seem like such a bad idea either.

Barney's jamming his key into the lock of Tool's parlor. Even if the man himself isn't there, the key should work.

"Let me try mine." you say. Barney's about to object, you don't have a key. Before his slow moving face can open and spew out words, you're already in. Kicking down doors used to be a lot easier.

Dark. Signs were off, which almost never happens. Lights are killed. You notice the door flew off its hinges instead of on the side you open. There are three chain locks still attached. No sign of a struggle. A note on the floor. No liquor taken, nothing changed. You're picking up the note as Christmas trickles in after Toll and Hale, looking at his phone, the phone illuminating his face with a friendly glow.

"Going to Vegas." -Tool

That's all he wrote. Rushed, scrawled, pencil rolled under the wheel of a bike. No bike missing, not Tool's. It's his handwriting though, you know it. Barney's snatching the keno ticket that served as the note's paper from your hand. Just something Tool would have knocking around in his pocket. Folded and rumpled a million times, all out of color. Probably went through the wash.

Toll's looking at you and you're looking at him. Christmas is looking at his phone and now you're looking at Hale. All three of you have a pretty good idea of what happened while you were gone.

"He went to Vegas, then." Barney says in a monotone voice. You feel your face turning very, very red. Everyone knows damn well what's going on. Barney wants to stick his fucking head in the sand.

"You really think he's at fucking Vegas?!" you scream, a little. Before you can even elaborate, Barney's hand is on your throat and you've been backed into the nearest wall. Everyone's face is a mask of shock. He's stronger than he looks, that Barney Ross. You're pretty sure you could take him, could throw him across the room and break his back on some pole. Despite it all, you respect him though. You can't hit him. You just sort of stand there while a man practically a foot shorter than you chokes you up against the wall. He looks in your eyes.

"He's at Vegas then, right?"

"Right." Christmas sort of whispers.

When your neck is released, you massage it. Barney ain't in on it. He'd never turn on his own fucking team. He knows the same as you though, he knows what went on. Stress though, self preservation, he ain't gonna pursue it. You pour yourself some straight tequila, you're gonna need it.

When you look up pathetic in the dictionary, there's a picture of a man too afraid to say what needs to be said.


	15. Chapter 15

You're walking into your apartment, slouching and heavy footed. Your mouth tastes like the rest of the day, left over, sour. When you open your door and duck into your own house, the smell hits you like a pound of sand. It's less of a smell though and more of a memory. A memory of what happened. The flies buzzing around the corpse's head, hat's a picture you'll be able to call up easily until you die, like so many others. You've killed people and have been so close that they've blown their last breath into your face. Add another memento to the pile, another mental scar to fester and deteriorate and push you closer and closer to some precipice of complete breakdown.

You're feeling around for the light switch, the exposed metal around it cold to the touch despite the relative heat of the apartment. You can smell yourself, not a bad smell, more like just a "you" smell. Of course, then again, the longer you're surrounded by your own stink the less you think of it as a stink. There's nothing much here. The air is stagnant and used up, smells all blending together to make the odor a musk of uneasiness. You don't like spending much time here because it makes you feel like a human failure. You didn't know they stacked shit this high.

The wooden table is more dried on liquid than it is wood. On it is something alien enough to make your guts clench and familiar enough to make your mouth water and sweat bloom onto your skin. Your body is a field of secretions, in this moment.

The baggie is closed expertly. The contents? Without grain or clumping together. It looks so pure and fresh. The last time you ever saw anything so completely unmarred was when you stared into a baby's eyes that one time. It's weird how something so rotten and vile and terrible can seem so nice and clean and sterile. Even babies shit.

Your fingers touch the outside of the bag, leaving traces in the yellowy sand. It's puss colored. You tell yourself it's like spoiled cream cheese begging to be thrown away. Except it's more like unbleached sugar the health nuts buy, as if the bleach is somehow hurting them. Make anything brown or tan and it gives off an air of being organic. The hippies eat that shit right up, literally.

You don't notice that you've picked up the bag and have it scrunched against your nose, unopened, until you open your eyes and stare at it in your palm. Sweat is trickling off your skin like you just got in from the rain. Your hands are shaking with anticipation. It was so easy last time. Last time you had somewhere to go, something to do. This time Tool's gone and Barney is ignoring it. There's nothing that's gonna make it any better.

Lifetimes have gone by. Your brain sat there and aged thousands of years while you stood there and looked at the bag. Except it was five minutes, except it didn't. You're becoming weak in the knees and even weaker in will. Before you know what you're doing, you're cramming the bag in your garbage disposal. When you turn it on the sound is frightening, just a little.

Instinct tells you to whirl around and you move out of the way just in time for the crowbar to hit your cheap counter top, cleaving its way right through the wood. You turn around and catch the crowbar in mid swing, hurting your hand a bit, and the black clad man is forced face down on a pile of your dirty dishes with his arm behind his back.

"You think I'm scared of a little shaky junkie with a crowbar?" The stains on his hoodie give him away, how unskilled he is.

"Who sent you?" you ask. Crack. He knows your serious. He's crying and whining. Let me go, let me go, let me go. A fly stuck under a microscope. There's nothing in his head but pain and crying and he's probably seeing stars. Crack. He's shaking with the pain under you. Let me go. A final plea. Your face is emotionless but the sweat betrays you. Crack. You don't notice he's dead until you hear his released urine hit the dingy tile floor of your kitchen. It doesn't take a genius to see he's eating a cyanide pill. Fucking coward.

It's a while before you remove your hands from the dead man and let his body fall to the floor. The olive green phone on the wall with the rotator dial, it's cold in your hand when you touch it and dial Barney's number.

He picks up the phone but he doesn't say anything. Maybe you hear him breathing, you think. Maybe you don't.

"More crank. A guy trying to kill me with a fucking crowbar. Took cyanide. You think the Tool thing is no big deal?" you sound hysterical. You are hysterical.

A moment of silence on the other end before the explosion. A monologue laced with gunpowder and C4 and acid.

You grew up with a couple of sisters and a younger brother. You were the oldest. The first one to start fucking up and getting into trouble, the one who started being blamed for things and taking full responsibility years before your siblings knew the meaning of the word. In time you learned that parents didn't scream to make you hurt, didn't hit and beat solely to punish you, rather to deal with their own anger. To blow off steam. Soon it started to bother you less and less until there was nothing left of it. You stood there with a glazed look in your eye, disinterested.

The glazed look returns after so many years. The phone slips out of your hand with Barney's distended voice still screaming from it like a bat out of hell. It's been thirty seconds and he doesn't know you're on the other side of the room staring at the stiffening corpse. It's been a minute. Two. Finally his voice stops and you put the phone back on the hook, silencing the dial tone. Better off that way.

It felt good to get him mad like that.

The next number you call is one you've hardly had to dial in the years you've had it.

"Hello?" the voice is breathing hard and a little ragged.

"Who is it, Hale?" asks a female's voice in the background, audible enough to you that she might be hanging on his back and speaking into the mouthpiece. She's obviously not too close if he's using the alias. You hear him stand up. Walk over to the other side of the room. Open the door and he's outside. The wind is flowing against the mouthpiece of the phone. It's some kind of new thing, last you saw. Nothing like a shitty blackberry or a flip phone. It's an iPhone, one of the white ones. Looks so strange in his black hand.

"What is it, Gunnar?" he asks. Another man might be a little more pissed that his love session was interrupted, but Hale's always been one to take you a bit seriously, to not brush you off. You remember back on the boat with the pirates, you were gonna hang the little fucker, Hale said to "Shoot Speed Racer in the shoulder." He's always known you dangerous you can be.

"Can I trust you?" Your breathing is still torn with anxiety and you offset your jaw like you always do when you're stressed or angry.

Silence on the receiver.

"Yeah. What's happening?" Caesar sounds weary and a little irritated now.

"Come over to my apartment." You're saying, the grit of your teeth just reaching your ears. You want some of that junk you crammed down the garbage disposal. Just enough to take the edge off. You feel tired.

"What?" he sounds incredulous. You can't blame him.

"There's something important going on." You've been uneasy about going into details on the phone lately. You're pretty sure every conversation is being recorded. The faint click click click of the recording device is so quiet that it's either nonexistent or the ones who set it up have underestimated how intact your hearing is after gunshot after gunshot has rang out in your ears.

"I see." Caesar says shortly. The woman's voice is there for but an instant until he closes the phone again.

Fifteen minutes later he's walking into your apartment. You didn't know that you'd left the door ajar but apparently you had. He stops short and looks at the body.

"Killed himself with cyanide." you say. He closes the door. You shrug. "Found meth before him, put it in the garbage disposal, guy comes at me with a crowbar."

"Do you think it's related to what happened to Tool?" he's frowning and that vertical crease has appeared in the middle of his eyebrows. His flat negroid nose is all scrunched up, but you can't tell whether it's from the smell of your apartment or the dead man laying in his own body wastes on the floor of your kitchen. Probably a little of both.

"Yes. Cyanide pills aren't too easy to get on the street. What exactly do you think happened to ol' Tool?" you say, raising an eyebrow. If he wasn't thinking along the same lines you were, he wouldn't be here. He wouldn't have mentioned him.

"I think he was kidnapped by Church's guys. There's nothing on Trench, nothing on Yang. It's easy to see what-"

"Then why is Barney sticking his head in the sand?" your anger is more general but Caesar thinks it's directed at him.

"I don't know, fool!" he says, borrowing some 80's jive that would sound silly coming out of his mouth if the situation wasn't so serious.

"Why would they send someone so weak to get me? Or was it a warning?" You're musing but you're also burnt out and you're also still a little drunk despite everything.

"We should go to Vegas." Caesar says shortly.

"Now?" You're not leaning on the wall anymore.

"As soon as your ready."

"The bikes or a car?"

"I have a pickup downstairs."

"That'll do."

You both go outside, you in your rumpled clothes spattered with paint from god knows what and Caesar with his messily put on barfly outfit. The starts are disappearing into dawn, but that's okay, because all you ever see of the stars are their old photographs. All this, the team, Barney, everything, you've all labored to build some sort of heaven for yourselves, yet all you've found in it are horrors. It couldn't have lasted forever, not even in a perfect world. And Gunnar? You know this world is more imperfect than Barney's toxin filled face. Knowing's half the battle. You know just what the horrors of the human race showed in the Gulf War. You knew it, you saw it, you took it all in. Then you embraced it. Became a mirror for the entire world's demons and wrongs.

A walking fucking horrorshow.


	16. Chapter 16

"We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. It's just passive chic bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There s just decisions and disease and death."

Two men drive through the desert kicking up dust and debris and shit all over the road. It's hot enough that water is evaporating right out of the bottles and your mouth feels like it's trying to drink itself. The truck is hot and your ass is stuck to the seat of your pants with sweat but actually you sort of hope it's not piss but you bet that at this point you couldn't even tell the difference.

"That's what you think?" Caesar asks, fiddling around with the sunglasses he's wearing. You've both been trading off driving, but you've had problems sleeping on the bumpy road. It's been four days and you're almost to Las Vegas. Right outside. Miles away.

"Yeah. "

"Nothing is simple. Not even things that are simply awful." he says, taking a bite of the fragment of sandwich left in his hand. He was hanging it out the window while he was driving with his other hand. You can hear him chomp on the sand. He doesn't say anything. A literal sandwich. Ha ha.

"How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure."

After that Hale just eyes you a little and goes about crunching the sand between his jaw. Your greasy hair is hanging all over your face and more and more it feels like you're doing a bad impersonation of yourself.

You find that the older you get, every year the future looks a little bit darker. But the past... even the grimy parts of it... keep on getting brighter.

Trench took a drag of his cigar, the end all wet because it'd been hanging in the crook of his mouth. The Hawaiian shirt did little to hide his huge muscles. It was a real cakewalk, even on paper, that mission. The idea was for the team to parachute in off their plane outside of Vancouver and just get some hot shot stock holder who'd gotten himself into a little trouble with a cartel. Cocaine, it did it to all the guys in those days. Every single mission would be some poor sod who'd gotten himself into a shitstorm because of the drug, or you'd all show up there thinking the mission had nothing to do with cocaine for a change and there he'd be, doing a line off a shard of mirror in his holding cell. It was good and it was bad but at least it was amusing. Now the whole world is so up against drugs and violence and they're gun grabbing and drug shaming that all the newbies who have just a taste do it in absolute shame, even if they don't fully realize it.

You're all taking your parachutes off. Trench and Barney co-led back then, fighting and squabbling amongst themselves whenever Trench wanted to save the day by himself or Barney preferred working with a team. There was you, nearing 40 and built of muscle that was more lean and powerful than anything to show off, a guy named Joker...

The thing about Joker was that he was more scary than helpful on these sorts of missions. A flat sort of head with beady blue eyes that looked dead even if they were a bright blue. Tattoos all over him that were words like TERMINATOR or KILLER and sometimes phrases like SHIT EATER or DESTROYER OF HOMES. He was short and his hair was bleached blonde so often that his scalp was permanently pink from it. He wore a big dog chain with a lock around his neck. He wasn't trying to make a statement other than stay the fuck away from me and most people did. He was a few years older than you.

Back then, when it was just five of you, you were the baby of the group. The parachutes lay on the ground.

"He should be about seven miles due east of here..." said Barney. He's poking around the bushes. It's July but the sun isn't exactly shining bright.

"Oh? Are we gonna have to walk the whole way?" asks Trench, more of a challenge than a question.

"Quads." Joker's saying, practically turning one over as he rips it out of the bush, dragging it horizontally on two wheels so they make divots in the earth. You and Trench find yours. Back then no one cared about being loud and obnoxious and seen by the enemy far too quickly. It was like there was some unspoken rule that stated if you started with that shit you were branded a pussy forever. Right before this mission you'd just lost a guy. Still no one cared too much.

Tool's brushing the back of his quad with his fingers like he wants to paint something on there while he's driving it over. Like it's a woman.

"Let's go." says Trench getting on his and revving it. What a fucking douchebag. You can see the soggy part of the cigar growing as it stays in his mouth. You're surprised he's not drooling. Then you all ride off into the night.

Racing to the finish, all of you. Tool's lagging behind everyone, he doesn't care much, but Joker's damn near knocked you off your quad more times than you'd care to say. Trench and Barney are way up ahead, their hands adorned with huge stupid rings that might tear flesh if they punched hard enough with them on. Trench's leg suddenly juts out, he's smiling, he thinks it's some kind of joke, and he pushes Barney's quad clear over.

Dirt and leaves spray everywhere. You feel smart for putting on your goggles. When you finally rip them off your face you expect to see Barney laying on the ground and trapped under the the side of his own quad. Leg broken. Instead, when the dirty lenses are off your eyes you see Barney and Trench really going at it. A fight that's more good-natured than anything. They used to be anyways. As time's gone on the fights have gotten more and more real. It's easy to see who's stronger, sure, but that doesn't mean Barney isn't giving it his all. Back then before wisdom gave way to Trench is still grinning that gap toothed grin of his and trying to get a hold of Barney's wrists as he pummels him.

In that moment all you felt was envy.

Joker with his white untanned muscles and his white crewcut and his padlock necklace is tearing Barney off Trench savagely and telling him to cool it down because we have to go. You wipe the dirt off your lips and nod in agreement. You pretend not to see how Barney gives a look of resentment towards Joker. He decides not to do anything though. Tool finally catches up, he'd probably seen that everyone had stopped and decided to take it easy on the throttle. Tool never was much of a fighter, you don't know why he got into this. He was so laid back, the type that would fire one or two well aimed shots a mission and be done with it. He'd never be the one at the end covered in scum and blood and stolen gold necklaces. Of course back then everyone said that it was just his fighting style. Truth is, you had no fucking clue why Tool was there.

Those were the days when any one of you could have quit and went on to do something else with your lives. When the new millennium came and things started getting sour fast, especially in those early years, there was still time to quit. You did, for six months, but then there had been and offer no one could have refused. You kept going for the long haul, knowing that you were damning yourself to a lifetime of fighting. Not caring much either.

The place where your guy was being held was a fucking abandoned apartment building warehouse factory shit or something. That's where your memory gets a little bit fuzzy.

"I'll go in, see where he is and report back." says Trench, his Austrian accent and cigar doing more than enough to mask what he's saying.

"No! You pull this shit every time and when we have to get you from the shit it's a real hassle." Barney's passing out the guns that were on his quad rack. You already all have ammo strapped to you. These guns are cheap enough that they could discharge in your hand, the throwaway types that you use for missions were you might have to, uh, throw them away. Trench doesn't put up might of a fight other than a shrug. Soon he wouldn't be able to resist, soon the gr

Joker looks at you and raises his eyebrows. He looks happy, almost. Excited. Years later you'd wear that same look before a battle. When it turned into the only time when you felt alive. Better than sex. Drugs? A poor substitute. A pity that your one coping mechanism kept you from doing the one thing that made you feel whole. Good thing it didn't last too long, eh?

You follow the ground in, crouched and half jogging in a position that would kill your back if you did it for too long today.

The side you rolled up on has no windows but you knew that. Quads aren't exactly quiet, but no one really cared about it. If they were smarter, they would have given guards walkie talkies and made them check in at regular intervals. Except that didn't happen and you pelted the stray guards with bullets flying out of silenced chambers. Puhchoo puhchoo, two lives ended.

Joker, he had this thing, you see. He ran over, his short stubby legs covered in muscle, he stomped on those guards. Their heads, until there were spatters of blood all over him. It wasn't normal for him to smile so bright, till there were flecks of the blood on his teeth too. That just wasn't fucking normal. Something was going wrong, something would desperately go wrong...

You woke with a start. A memory turned into a nightmare that paralleled how it really went down all too well. The trap, Joker throwing everyone to the wolves for money and a grudge, Barney finally having enough of it and breaking the group in two. It's funny how history repeats itself.

"You aight?" asks Caesar, one hand on the wheel. The bright lights are going past your car, advertising sex, drugs and the American Dream. Maybe if things were different you could come here and burn some of your money. Maybe if things were different you wouldn't be here at all. Hale's a little buzzed, he's been sipping beer out of a travel mug all day.

"Yeah." you wipe your eyes from your knuckle to your wrist and find that you sweated right through that dream. It's hot in the car but it's hotter outside.

"You snore like nobody's business." he states, sipping from the mug. Usually Caesar's not that big a drinker but then again there's been a lot going on lately.

"Yeah." you say again. "So what now? We get a hotel? Call around and ask for..." it's just dawned on you that the man's real name obviously isn't Tool.

"You mean you don't know his real name?!" The car rolls on past another gentleman's club on the strip, almost at a snail's pace.

"No."

"And HOW long have you been working with the dude?"

You find that you really don't want to answer that. Fifteen minutes of aggravated silence from Hale later, you're pulling into a seedy looking motel. You pay the guy with the cash you have in your pockets, realizing that you look a hot mess.

"We could call Barney and just ask."

"Called him before I even called you. He freaked the hell out even at the mention of the whole damn thing. Ol' Barns finally reached his breaking point, I think. Wants to pretend none of it is happening."

Caesar nods and flicks on the television, looking at it so intensely, the shitty local news, that he's probably not processing what's on screen and is instead just stuck in his own world. You fiddle with the coffee machine.

Some addictions are fine. Others get you kicked off a team.

The television drones in the background, the canned anchorman's voice narrates the tragedy of the day.

"And in local news, a male body was found in a dumpster, burned beyond recognition. Currently forensic investigators are trying to find out the man's identity, but with no teeth to take dental records from, it'll be a challenge. Also, Whooptie the Whippet, famed stunt dog, died this morning after a long battle with cancer. Both her and her act will be-"

Hale flicks off the television. You're standing there stupidly with the coffee filter in your hand.

"How much you wanna bet that body's Tool's?" he says quietly, talking to you but looking at the television, at his own curved reflection.

"Oh, come on. There's lots of murders in Vegas." your dismissive tone doesn't have the heart behind it to be effective.

"Murders where the killers know enough to yank the teeth out of the corpse?"

You don't have a reply to that.

"Do you honestly still think this is Church, Gunnar?"

"Does it matter either way? I think we both know how this is going to e-"

Gunfire, both of you hit the floor. You don't know what's going on but when you hear gas being released from a canister you hold your breath. It's a race against your lung capacity, a race against the buildup of lactic acid and when your brain decides that it's been depraved enough to shut itself off and start again. You kick out the window in the bathroom, the little one, and hit some goon out there with a gun in the face. His gun sprays bullets all over the side of the building and some couple in the parking lot screams at the tops of their voice but you're still out of there and running, the goon's gun in your hands. It's the sort of gun, an AK-47, the kind where the serial number isn't scratched off and it was obviously gotten legally. You don't have time to look back at what the guy was wearing but soon enough you're shooting at the cars you think they came from trying to at least hit the gas tank so they can't drive nowhere, but your aim certainly isn't what it used to be and moreover this isn't the sort of gun that you're used to owning.

Police sirens in the distance. You don't notice Hale running out the same way you got out. Fuck. He went through a fight. You'd say that you thought he was right behind you but that's not true. The fact of the matter is that in situations like that sometimes it's every man for himself. That's how it should have been with Billy the Kid. He should have died there without the case being handed over. Maybe white knights like Barney would have guilted over it, maybe poured over what could have been. You've learned that there is a line where honor stops and self preservation begins. The bigger someone's honor section is, the more likely they are to get killed dead.

Hale doesn't comment on you effectively leaving him to the wolves. You don't feel the need to comment.

"We gotta get back to New Orleans. This was a fucking mistake." he's not out of breath like you'd expect him to be. Apparently sex takes more out of him than running an eighth of a mile. That tells you a lot about what his life is like.

"You finish them off?" you ask. He nods.

"So eager to do something just to prove to Barney I'm not some shape in the background, some token..." he's muttering under his breath. You pretend not to hear.

You clean the gun of any fingerprints with your shirt and drop the gun in the earth, making sure your shoes aren't leaving tracks.

"Those plates traceable to you?" you ask Caesar.

"No."

"Good." and that's all that needs to be said.

Your gut is telling you that Tool was a way to get the group split up and lured over here. This whole thing was a fucking trap. By the time you get over to New Orleans you fully expect the shit to have totally hit the fucking fan. No doubt about it.

They say Hell is the impossibility of reason.

* * *

Author's Note: To everyone that's read up to this point, thank you. I cannot be more plain and I cannot make the words hold the weight I'd like them to, so I've leave it at that. Thank you.


End file.
